We're all being schooled for moral depravity

Once again, the United States is putting itself in the international war crimes business. If a distinguishing feature of GW Bush's "War on Terror" was institutionalized torture of unfortunate captive brown men, it seems that a central motif of Trump's imperial adventures is using and enlisting the people of the U.S. military in the murder of civilians. 

The ongoing sinking of small boats off Central America without any proof of their involvement any offense is one instance.

Now we get news of an apparently intentional airstrike on a civilian water treatment facility in southern Iran; at least 20,000 Iranians will lose access to clean water.

Strikes early Wednesday destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Around the time of the strikes, the U.S. Central Command said in a post on X that it had conducted attacks near the strait “with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets.” 

Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week.

Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews Phillips P. O'Brien responds to this report without equivocation. 

Is It A War Crime?

Without a doubt. Attacking other infrastructure was probably a war crime as well (think bridges or power plants) but there can at least be arguments made that these are dual use facilities. Militaries use bridges, military production uses generated electricity. If the US destroyed all the bridges in Iran or shut off all the power, as Trump has threatened numerous times, I would definitely consider it a war crime. However, lawyers could try and argue that because of military use, these are allowable targets.

However, a reservoir serving a civilian community is unarguably a crime. The military will get its water somehow, the civilians will suffer. 

And note, this is one of the hottest and driest places on the globe. Academic data for the Sirik region confirms that summer temperatures routinely peak between 45°C and 48.5°C during the warmest months. That is over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That is comparable to Death Valley in California.

A human being cannot live long in such a climate without water—so either the locals will die of dehydration or, more likely, some will drink contaminated water and die from that.

Either way the US has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime. 

We need to understand that when the military of the United States commits these atrocities against international laws and norms -- as well as against our own legal codes that are supposed to govern our soldiers, sailors and airmen -- something else is happening beyond the immediate rupture of standards.

The Trump/Hegseth regime is corrupting the military, intentionally enlisting serving personnel in crimes. Our rulers want our military to get used to doing these things.

But, like the Bush regime before him, Trump is also corrupting us all. Do we accept that doing wanton murder to prove a point (probably unsuccessfully) is just something this country does? Are we that kind of country? If so, who are we?

We probably don't much care; these crimes are far away and inflicted on people we don't know. And most of the world is certainly not surprised. They live alongside an American colossus that periodically defaults to murderous illegal war-making.

But previous episodes of this national pastime usually evoked some squeamishness from the perpetrators: "No -- it wasn't that bad, it was a mistake, we didn't mean it." 

The Trump regime does mean it: it wants to teach us to thrill to unvarnished, extralegal murder. 

Instructions for interpreting our Orange Toddler monster

Is he serious -- or is he bluffing? Journalist and activist Parker Molloy has some suggestions for navigating that question while Trump continues to bark and weave while threatening genocide.

She's insightful in describing how most of our media play Trump's game, falling for his lying feints over and over again.

By Tuesday, Operation Epic Fury had been running for six weeks. The whole time, Trump had been telling anyone listening exactly what he planned to do. He said Iran could be “taken out in one night,” and named the bridges and power plants that would come down. Each of those threats was parsed by the political press. Each was processed as leverage or theater. Each was written off as Trump being Trump.

Then the bombs started falling. On Kharg Island. On power plants. On bridges.

The ["take him seriously, but not literally] frame has a near-perfect track record of being wrong in one direction. It rarely overestimates how far Trump will go. It only underestimates him. A prediction that’s always wrong in the same direction stops being analysis and starts being an alibi.

[Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh] Hammer reached for the ... line on the day Trump posted that a whole civilization would die that night. That’s the tell. That’s what “seriously, not literally” is actually for. The frame comes out when the sentence is so plainly monstrous that the only defense left is to tell the reader not to read. 

That's the pattern we are caught in by this decompensating madman. If JD cannot pull a rabbit out of an empty hat to cover up the United States' strategic defeat by the mullahs, she predicts we'll see some variant again:

... Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly backed off his own deadlines at the last possible hour. The sequence is always the same: threat, deadline, airstrike, walkback, a news cycle crediting him with dealmaking, the original threat filed away. The walkback itself becomes retroactive evidence that the morning post was never serious. And the next morning, he can say something worse.

By Wednesday morning, the headlines were about the Hormuz ceasefire. The genocide post was yesterday’s news. The laundering was happening in real time. 

Trump is failing at home. Even Melania is undermining his defenses. How about a little genocide in the one arena where his power is still apparently unfettered?  

"The strikes were everywhere, all at once."

The Guardian's soft spoken reporter Will Christou spells out the shock in the Lebanese capital when Israel bombed central Beirut, killing at least 250 yesterday. This ten minute clip is much longer than what I usually post here, but I would urge readers to take the time to watch. It's not gory; instead, it is morally devastating.

The leaders of Israel are ethical monsters, as are our own US rulers. As, of course also, are the Iranian rulers and the princelings of the Gulf States. 

Say it loud: Trump is failing

I'm going to outsource this to that stalwart Democratic agitator Simon Rosenberg:

That Trump is no longer mentally competent isn’t really a question. For to understand how we got to where we are as a country you have to start by accepting that he is mad, and that he believes that he has the power to bend reality to his match his own imagined and fantastical world. 

... In many ways the central project of Trumpism is this daily construction and defense of this imagined world so dear to him; of maintaining the fiction of Oz; of the pretending that indeed the orange Emperor has no clothes. The “play’s the thing” Shakespeare once wrote. And so it is with the Trump regime. Every day.

The problem with all of this for Dear Leader, of course, is there is an objective world out there that he cannot bend to his malevolent will. People and nations have agency. Facts are stubborn things. ...

Trumpism has failed as a project because at its core it is mad, dismissive of truth and fact and reason, an imagined world at war with the real one. And the real one keeps winning, and Trump - and all of us - keep losing.

And now Trump has started a war he cannot escape that is alienating every possible friend and partner on the globe. And he wants $200 billion of taxpayer money for his murderous folly. Rosenberg outlines what Congress should demand before considering authorizing a penny:

Trump has becoming increasingly unstable, as has his regime. His utterances each day about the war are outrageously incoherent. ... we must make very clear what it will take to get our vote for this funding. Here’s my working list:

• End This New Gulf War, And Trump’s Global Imperial Ambitions

• Make Clear We Support Ukraine and Europe, Not Russia

• Roll Back The New, Illegal Tariffs

• Rescind The Trump Tax Cuts, Claw Back The Extra ICE Funding

• Make The US A Clean Energy Superpower, Fight For True Energy Independence, And Lower Energy Prices For The American People

• Keep Fighting To Rein In ICE, End Mass Deportation

• End the War on Science, Health and Public Health

• Demand the Resignations of Hegseth, Bondi, Kennedy

 Yes, I know, Simon, this is too much. We can’t ask for all that. My point is that something like this should be our agenda now; we have to stop playing defense, being tactical, and start going on offense, being far more strategic. Trump and his regime have failed, and it has begun to crack up. ...

That's a good list of demands; we need to begin to have one. I think Rosenberg is right; the time has come to leave tactical asks behind and demand it all. Dems will be bashed for "not supporting the troops .." if they balk on the $200 billion down posit for war, but we've been down that road before. No money for this illegal war!

Let's all see each other on Saturday, March 28 at NO KINGS.  And beyond.

Excrement compounded

There's a tongue-in-cheek joke that our wars are how Americans learn what little we know about global geography. Apparently the Orange Toddler's latest Middle East atrocity is going to teach us about fertilizer.

From the NY Times [gift]: 

... War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.

... “It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”

... The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.

... Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.

... The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.

India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.

As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.

... A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.

The ignorance of the Trump clowns is no excuse.

• • •

Nor is ignorance an excuse for what US and Israeli bombing of Iranian oil depots has wrought. Bill McKibben tells the story of in pictures.

... here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

“The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.

Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Fire and fury indeed -- to distract from probable child rape in the Epstein files?

White Christian Nationalists and an American soldier

Yesterday a young man wonderfully named Godspower Nwawuihe scored two touchdowns for the US Military Academy team in a rout of the University of Connecticut in the Fenway Bowl in Boston. The internet is not very forthcoming about his ancestry, but hints that his parents came from Lagos, Nigeria, before settling in Garland, Texas. 

The day before yesterday, Donald Trump ordered the US military to lob missiles at northwestern Nigeria. CNN reports that people on the ground in the target area were mystified. 

Abuja, Nigeria  — A day after part of a missile fired by the United States hit their village, landing just meters from its only medical facility, the people of Jabo in northwestern Nigeria are in a state of shock and confusion.

... Kagara did not realize it at the time, but what he was witnessing was part of a US strike that President Donald Trump would later refer to as a “Christmas present” for terrorists.

Not long after the impact in Jabo, Trump declared on Thursday that the US had carried out a “powerful and deadly strike” against ISIS militants in the region, who he accused of “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!” 

According to US Africa Command, the operation neutralized multiple ISIS militants. 

But Trump’s explanation has left Kagara and his fellow villagers scratching their heads. 

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa – which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with Islamic State – villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.  

“In Jabo, we see Christians as our brothers. We don’t have religious conflicts, so we weren’t expecting this,” he said.

When local violence does break out in northwestern Nigeria, it seems often to involve conflicts between herders who are Muslims and settled farmers who are Christian. Such conflicts are thought to have been part of human history all over the world.

Should Mr. Nwawuihe complete his time at West Point and be commissioned as an Army officer, will he be sent to kill Nigerians? 

Mr. Trump seems to treat random strikes in Nigeria as a gift to white US Christians who probably couldn't find Nigeria on a map. These strikes are just one more crime against hard won civilization from our clownish grifter ...

• • •

The contemporary Republican base of white evangelicals is a morass of white Christian nationalism. They think God gave them this country and they have a right to rule us all -- and the world too.

 Historian of religion Jemar Tisby provides a succinct definition of the affliction. 

White Christian nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christianity as a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control. 

It is characterized by beliefs such as a conviction that Christians have a mandate to exercise dominion over all segments of society, the notion that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, and the sense that they are under attack by anti-American and anti-Christian forces. ...

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian catalogues the fixations and crimes of the nationalist-deluded. 

... White Christian nationalists generally do not seem interested in good works, helping the most vulnerable, or personal character. This is a movement seeking power, not redemption. Its adherents are motivated to remake America into a white, Christian dominated nation. 

Lacking the votes to bring their goals about through democracy, they are all too willing to suppress voting and rely on other anti-democratic measures. Blowing up people on the high seas, separating children from parents, brutalizing Hispanics, and taking away SNAP benefits are features, not bugs for people lacking empathy who seek racial and religious dominance.

These people are a lot of us. Sociologist Robert P. Jones attempted last March to measure carefully the prevalence of this dangerous fantasy.

... three in ten Americans qualified as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (29%). These percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022. In other words, Christian nationalism supporters, while a sizable minority, are outnumbered by a margin of two to one among the general public.

... A majority of Republicans today qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (20%) or Sympathizers (33%), compared to less than one quarter of independents (6% Adherents and 16% Sympathizers) and less than one fifth of Democrats (5% Adherents and 11% Sympathizers). These views are reinforced by TV media outlets consumed disproportionately by Republicans, such as Fox News or far right TV news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax.

... As the US has become more racially and religiously diverse over the past few decades, our two major political parties have responded in dramatically different ways to these shifts. Today, only 41% of Americans identify as white and Christian. But today’s Republican Party is 70% white and Christian, a stark contrast from the Democratic Party, which is 25% white and Christian.

... We see the connection between Christian nationalism and support for political violence clearly in the data. Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and nearly three in ten Sympathizers (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 15% of Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.

If these folks get their way, Mr. Nwawuihe may indeed find himself dispatched to attack people in the land of his ancestors. What a dangerous, ignorant world we are making ... 

"Cameras are treated as weapons ... those who hold them as combatants."

On this quiet Sunday morning while reading my daily quota of news, this image stopped me cold:

The story, from the journal +972, begins: 

Maryam Abu Daqqa was my friend. She was a photojournalist and a mother. On Monday, she was killed by the Israeli army in a “double tap” attack on Nasser Hospital, along with four other journalists. She was 32 years old.

I first met Maryam in 2015 during a photography course in the Italian center in Gaza City, where she was one of the trainees. I was drawn to her energy. I remember thinking how quickly she spoke, as if she had more ideas than time to express them.

She came from Abasan, east of Khan Younis, an agricultural town famous for its fruits, vegetables, and delicious cuisine. Whenever I reported on farming there, I knew I could turn to her. She was always ready to help, and her photos of the village and its people never failed to inspire me.

At first, I didn’t know that Maryam was a mother. One day before the war, while I was working in Abasan, I heard a boy call out to her: “Mom!” I was surprised. She laughed and introduced me to her son. “This is Ghaith,” she said proudly. “He is my man, and he will protect me when he grows up.” She told me all of her work was for him. ...

You can read it all.  You should.

* +972 refers to the international area code for Israel/Palestine. 

Stuck between Trump and Putin

I too stand with Ukraine, rule of law, and freedom. Just saying.

• • • 

In response to Donald Trump's announced suck up session with Vladimir Putin on Monday in Alaska we should remember that when the Russian dictator steps on US soil, our international obligation is arrest him and convey him to answer the indictment of the International Criminal Court. 

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

Charges

Allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, (i) for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute), and (ii) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility (article 28(b) of the Rome Statute).

Not likely, but this is who Donald fawns over. I guess Donald is about to make himself an accessory to Putin's crimes ... That would be on top of the many Trump crimes against the US Constitution and us here in this country.

War crimes accelerate in Ukraine

As the Trump regime settles in, it would be too easy to look away from horrors far away. But let's not.

Here's retired Australian general Mick Ryan reminding us why Ukraine cannot surrender to Putin's aggression:

Russian Executions of Ukrainian PoWs Continue.

The Prosecutor General's Office in Ukraine this week opened yet another criminal case against Russia for war crimes after a video emerged that shows Russian soldiers executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war. The events shown in the video, which include the Russian soldiers discussing who should shoot each prisoner of war, apparently occured in the Donetsk region.

The number of executions of unarmed Ukrainian POWs immediately after their capture has increased significantly in the past year. The Ukrainian authorities have recorded in excess of 180 executions of Ukrainian POWs by the Russians since February 2022. Given how much ambiguity there often is in combat operations, there almost certain to have been many more than this number. ...

The prevalence of these crimes in the Russian army indicates that their soldiers are either ordered or incentivised to shoot PoWs by their commanders, or that Russian commanders willingly look away from such events. Either way, it has been systematised now in the Russian system. And the fact that Russian soldiers video these crimes and post them online means they don’t fear any form of retribution from their own commanders.

As such, not only are the individuals who commit the crimes responsible but so is their entire chain of command that has ignored these events. There is simply no way now that any Russian officer can claim in the future that ‘I didn’t know this was occuring’.

For those interested in more details about the magnitude of Russian war crimes committed since February 2022, this report from the Congressional Research Service provides a good overview.

I have to wonder whether under the Trump regime, that government report will be trashed. Get it while you can.

I'm sure Trump's idea of "peace" in Ukraine is that the embattled country must surrender. Ukraine can't.

Consider the alternative

Erudite Partner tackles the moral dilemma of our moment: can we, in order to block Donald Trump's ambitious fascist plans, vote to re-elect the enabler of Bibi Netanyahu's slaughter of Gaza Palestinians? Can we? She reports a recent conversation.

... [a] college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden—and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Oh, do I ever understand! My first vote for President was for Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a moral coward who dared not repudiate Lyndon Johnson's futile, endless war against the Vietnamese and Vietnamese nationalism. I had spent years working to turn a confused country around, yet I was stuck with only a lesser evil choice. The alternative was Richard Nixon who got us more war and finally corruption and disgrace. 

The E.P. reminds us what we'd get with the alternative to Biden:

... lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

In the California primary, I left the presidential line blank. I cast that vote before the campaign in Michigan to protest through voting "uncommitted" took off -- my protest was instinctive and it seems about 10 percent of Californians did the same without much organizing.  

But in the fall I'll be working to re-elect Biden in some swing state, I hope. Maybe I'll skip Biden again on my California ballot. But people located where their presidential votes matter, should consider the alternative.

From the Israeli ground

A Washington Post story about the Israeli war on Gaza as it plays in the city schools reports this from a mother: 

“In Berkeley, you can only be an oppressor or the oppressed,” she said.

Would that reality were so simple! But, all too often, it just isn't. And peace is not advanced by pretending it is. Yes -- Gazans are being wantonly made homeless and slaughtered by superior Israeli fire power. And yes, rightful Palestinian claims in their homeland were being shamelessly erased until Hamas took violent action. But 10/7 was nonetheless criminal and also cannot be erased.

Israeli peace activist Dana Mills (her affiliations include 972+ Magazine and Standing Together) reflects on the horror of struggling for a moral stance while a citizen of a country engaged on atrocity.

... Israelis and Palestinians, both, are constantly frustrated by the unequivocalness in which people from around the world weigh in and tell us what they think we must do in order to save our homelands. The question of having "stakes" in something is very real here. There are degrees of removal from what is happening here. If your family is implicated in what has been unfolding since the 7 October-- on either side-- you are in a different emotional and ideational position than if you are observing it from a distance. If your choices, the issues you're advocating for will have direct consequence on your everyday life you are in a different position to that of advocating for something that will never circle back to you.

Is moral humanism an empty idea, then?

I think not. It is very clear to me that the attack on Gaza is an attack on humanity itself. Not just the humanity of the Palestinian people, but the absolute wreckage, targeting many cultural institutions, demolishing whole neighborhoods--- this is not just an attack on Gazans or Palestinians.

Conversely, I would say that the 7 October attacks were, too, attack on humanity itself. Entering civilian homes at dawn and kidnapping young children is an attack on everyone who is asleep in their bed on an autumnal morning anywhere.

However, I started by writing about Gaza due to the horrendous magnitude-- and longevity-- of the Israeli attack, and thus its consequences. It might be argued that Hamas would have wished to inflict the same devastation on Israel had it had the means. But, well, it didn't.

And the attack on humanity is now apparent from my (wrong) side of history. I can sympathize and understand when people want to act in solidarity with Gaza, even if it pushes them to strange moral positions (and ineffective political positions). I can understand the helplessness of watching this horror unfold live before our eyes and not being able to do anything.

I can also understand those who have stakes in different ways; whose countries send arms to Israel, who feel that their leaders continue to be allies to Netanyahu despite him obviously losing any control over what is unfolding here. I am not a legal scholar so I do not want to weigh on the question of genocide. But I do know an attack of this magnitude warrants a response from humanity at large.

Captured by Mills in Tel Aviv

Condemning the Israeli state that is enacting those actions does not mean losing hold of the humanity of Israelis who are trying -- in different ways-- to resist it. I also feel, strongly, that we, Israelis, are losing our humanity the more this continues, the more we see these horrific actions done in our name. The longer we see our own abducted citizens neglected in the name of revenge and eternal war.

Many of us are trying to hold on to our humanity in different ways: writing, reading, dancing, painting, engaging what it means to be human. This is a grave crisis for anyone who sees themselves as humanist. It is not enough to eternally return to the question of "philosophy after Auschwitz". We need to live life with clear and open eyes to the wrongs enacted by us, around us, in the here and now.

These thoughts did not leave me with a clear action-plan: I do not know what it means to be a humanist during a war/genocide, apart from calling for its end, searching hard for humanism in different corners of your world, finding a way to connect it and encouraging it in myself and others. But I know we are living through a major test for humanity and humanism. May we get through it and learn our lessons.

For Americans who care about peace, all this should be all too familiar. 

We too have launched murderous wars of revenge, slaughtering and torturing Iraqis, Afghans, and so many more. 

And for us, the action plan is simpler -- let's force our government to stop paying for Israel's war. And we can be very glad that there are Israelis, even though only a small remnant, that are struggling to comprehend what peace and justice might mean in their circumstances. We've been there.

Veterans Day

Although conveniently for working people, the federal holiday was yesterday, I think of November 11 as the "real" Veterans Day. It originated to mark the Armistice which ended the western portion of World War I; at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11 month, the guns finally fell silent.

This Veterans Day, I think, as I often do these days, of the service of my sometime uncle, Brigadier General Johnny Lentz. He counts as a "sometime uncle" because, by the time I came along, my aunt had gone on to husband number three of what was eventually four.

Lentz was the ex-husband my parents were proud to keep a connection with. He served as General George Patton's logistic officer during that tank commander's charge across occupied France and into Germany in 1944-5.

But when the shooting ended, Lentz took up a role which I only discovered much more recently in a book about the development of the laws of war in the post-WWII war crimes trials. 

General Lentz presided over the military court which tried the German officers who had run the Dachau concentration camp. That trial set the pattern for the much more significant Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders; Nuremberg is a prime source of international laws of war recognized by treaty and the United Nations.

After listening to the evidence, and the opportunities for defense, the Dachau tribunal found the defendants guilty. General Lentz pronounced:

'The evidence presented to this court convinced it beyond any doubt that the Dachau concentration camp and its by-camps subjected its inmates to killings, beatings, tortures, indignities, and starvation to an extent and degree that necessitates the indictment of everyone, high and low, who had anything to do with the conduct and operation of the camp. This court reiterates that it sits in judgment under international law and under such laws of humanity and human behavior that are commonly recognized by civilized people.

"Many of the acts committed at Dachau," Lentz said, "clearly had the sanction of the high officials of the German Reich and the de facto laws and customs of the German government. It is the view of this court, however, that when a state sets itself up above reasonably recognized international law, or transcends civilized customs of human behavior, then the individuals effecting such policies must be held responsible for their part in violating international law and the customs and laws to humanity."

That is, this court insisted on the responsibility of individuals for "just following orders." He ordered 38 defendants hanged.

The story of the postwar military tribunals and international law is explored thoroughly in Justice at Dachau which I got out of the San Francisco Public Library. 

Thank you for your service, Uncle Johnny.

Moral injury compounding death and destruction

Benjamin Wittes edits Lawfare for the Brookings Institution. In the context of exploring Strategy, Law, and Morality in Israel’s Gaza Operation he has written a cogent description of the two societies at war in that benighted corner of the world which captures what Americans don't often know and perhaps are newly learning. 

With the possible exception of the Demilitarized Zone in the Korean peninsula, there is no geographic line in the world across which life changes more dramatically over a shorter distance than the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip.

On one side of the line, the per-capita gross domestic product is $55,000 per year, according to the International Monetary Fund—just over two-thirds that of the United States. The population density is low. While Israel itself packs a lot of people into a small area, in general, the region surrounding the Gaza border lies outside of the sprawl that runs up and down the coastal plain and between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is dotted with small agricultural villages. The only major city in the region, Ashkelon, is 13 kilometers away and has fewer than 150,000 people—with closer-by Sderot having only about a fifth that many people.

On this side of the line, governance is the province of a modern, highly functional state, overseen by an elected government. Infrastructure is modern. Social services are highly developed. The sovereignty of that state, while controversial in academic circles worldwide and still unrecognized by a number of regional actors, is firmly established and increasingly recognized by the other states in the region. The lingua franca on this side of the line is Hebrew, but depending on precisely where along the border and how far from it you are, the street language for many people may also be Arabic, Russian, or English. 

San Francisco cease fire demonstration

Cross over into Gaza—and, the proximity being what it is, Israeli villages extend right up to the line—and everything changes. The per-capita income plummets by more than 97 percent to around $1,250 per year, according to the World Bank. Worldwide, only wealthy city-states like Monaco and Singapore and jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Macau exceed Gaza’s population density; more than 2 million people are crammed into an area roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaza’s infrastructure is a disaster, with drinkable water and electricity alike both scarce, and food insecurity widespread. Government social services are virtually nonexistent. The deprivation is fueled, in part, by a long, partial blockade of the territory maintained by both Israel and Egypt.

The territory is ruled by Hamas, a fundamentalist militia that both the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization, which won a legislative election in 2006 and seized executive power in a kind of coup the following year. Hamas’s military infrastructure is deeply embedded within the civilian population with both command centers located in civilian buildings and weapons caches and launch sites based in or near civilian institutions or residences. Sovereignty, however, is undetermined. Israel, which was the occupying power until 2005, makes no sovereign claims over Gaza. Neither does Egypt, which occupied the strip from the time of Israel’s founding until 1967. The Palestinian Authority has never declared a Palestinian state and doesn’t control the territory in any event. And Hamas has not declared itself a sovereign entity either. The spoken language on this side of the line is almost uniformly Arabic. Roughly half of the population is under 18.

I draw this picture of contrast neither to assign blame for the shocking disparity in living conditions evident in the descriptions (there’s enough blame to go around), nor to complain on behalf of Palestinians about their comparative misfortune (though complaint is certainly justified), nor to triumph on behalf of Israelis at their comparative windfall (though the accomplishments of the Israeli state are nothing to sneeze at). 

Wittes continues to discuss both legal and moral implications of Israel's bombing and apparent impending invasion of the Gaza territory. They say they aim to eradicate Hamas in response to the atrocities of 10/7. He asks, can Israel mount an assault that is more than collective punishment, largely of the innocent, more than a reprisal for evil done that itself is evil in return?

You can read his argument yourself. It's very clear. I was most struck by this:

... as I see it anyway, to wage this conflict even in self-defense without a coherent strategy is morally dicey. It is not, to be clear, a war crime. There is no principle of the law of armed conflict that makes it a crime to respond flailingly and without a well-thought-through strategy to an armed attack.  

Yet when a lot of civilians (many of them children) are going to die in a conflict, that fact imparts a certain responsibility to think things through carefully—and specifically to think through the question of how things are going to be better at the end of the conflict than they are now. This same point, by the way, flows from the fact that a lot of Israeli soldiers—for whose lives the Israeli government is more directly accountable—are also going to die. Without a strategy, a sound, well-thought-through strategy, the operation is really just a giant reprisal attack.

... if Israel is not operating pursuant to clear objectives that warrant the cost it is exacting, that is a grave moral problem irrespective of whether the individual strikes are lawful. And it’s a problem that Israel needs to rectify immediately.

Israel's backers, especially the Biden administration, need to be saying this loud and clear.

• • •

After all, the United State, to our sorrow, knows what a war without definable ends looks like. We made exactly that in Afghanistan for 20 years and left, bloodied, without having accomplished anything except spreading misery and a lot of dead Afghans.

Today's New York Times includes a heart-rending account (gift article) by a U.S. Marine veteran sniper turned journalist who got to ride along with a Ukrainian sniper team trying to kill Russian soldiers. 

“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor [Ukrainian sniper's nom de guerre] went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.

We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.

When Israel's Gaza response concludes -- which it must someday -- will justified rage at Hamas atrocities turn to further moral injury to Israel and the supportive world as well as material injury and death to unfortunate Gazans?

It's not a pretty picture

 

I guess you'd have to predict this guy couldn't just fade away. More than half a century of imperial promotion, torture, and war-making doesn't lead to a graceful exit.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner reminds us of centenarian Henry Kissinger's many contributions to the last eight decades of U.S. efforts to seize and hold onto global hegemony. 

It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.

... Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

... If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.  ...

Read it all.

On the bombing of cities

Historian Adam Tooze has responded to the Oppenheimer movie about the scientist and the A-Bomb with a reminder that American and British bombing campaigns against cities in WWII can be seen as "the most concentrated expression of modern industrialism."  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most remembered episodes. Eighty years ago this summer, the Allied bombing of Hamburg incinerated at least 40,000 humans.

On the ascending curve of aerial attacks on cities - a terrifying vision that haunted the 20th century - a crescendo that started in earnest in Guernica in 1937 and continued with the attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, the London Blitz and Coventry, after the RAF’s 1000-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942 and the sustained campaign against the German industrial centers of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, Hamburg marked a point of culmination. It was the first aerial attack that came close to fully destroying a big city and rendering it at least temporarily uninhabitable. It was an important way-station en route to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

... The temperatures generated by the fire storm were unprecedented and anticipated those of the atomic explosions to come. Glass and metal melted. Bodies were mummified en masse.

In the aftermath, one million people were forced to flee the city in panic. In Berlin, in Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry the mood was apocalyptic. If the British and American bombers could do this to any German city at will, Speer remarked that the German economic planners might as well put a bullet in their brains.

... The most devastating single aerial attack of the war came not in Europe but in Japan, with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10 1945, which likely killed over 100,000 people. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was not an isolated or unprecedented act of urbicide. It was the deliberate and long-planned extension of a campaign that first showed its terrifying potential in Hamburg 80 years ago.

Though historians have thoroughly documented all this, such is still not a common understanding in the Anglosphere, where we still (for some good reasons as well as morally ignorant ones) cling to the notion of WWII as "the good war."

Reading Tooze on urbicide-past had great resonance for me as it threw me back into the moment, in 1963 as an impressionable high school sophomore, when I first encountered the possibility that, though the Nazis had been unspeakably evil, "the West" had its own faults. I had a sort of in-school paper route that year, distributing paper copies of the New York Times delivered daily to a few student and faculty subscribers. For this I earned a few dollars a month which were all mine -- and which I immediately blew on a paperback book sale rake next to the school's administrative office. I don't imagine anyone else ever bought any book from that very haphazard collection, but I experienced buying from it as a tiny taste of freedom.

Somehow Dwight MacDonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist caught my attention. Why it was there I don't know; MacDonald wrote cultural criticism for the New Yorker, and was a moderately well-known intellectual pundit. He'd have a successful Substack nowadays. The heart of this volume was the story of how he stopped being a very ordinary 1930s American leftist, took up Trotskyism and recovered, and made his unhappy peace with the 1950s United States as the world's lesser evil.

In the main essay, first published before the end of the European war in March 1945, he struggles with the morality of the Allies, already fully aware of Auschwitz, the attempted extermination of all European Jews and other misfits, as well as Nazi atrocities across occupied Europe. But even then -- before Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- he wasn't about to let the Allies off an ethical hook for the bombings of cities.

There was much moral indignation, for example, about the [V-8] rocket bombs [aimed by the Germans at London]. But the effects of "saturation bombing," which the British and American air forces have brought to a high degree of perfection, are just as indiscriminate and much more murderous. "The Allied air chiefs," states this morning's paper, "have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers. ... The Allied view is that bombardment of large German cities creates immediate need for relief. This is moved into the bombed areas by rail and road, and not only creates a traffic problem but draws transport away from the battle front. Evacuations of the homeless has the same result." The only mistake in the above is to say the decision has just been adopted ...

Even in 1945, even during a "good war," it was possible to observe that much of what one's "own side" was doing was immoral -- and to wrestle vigorously with the implications. Not necessarily to condemn one's side (MacDonald at length does not) but neither to erase crimes. 

In 1953, MacDonald added a footnote:

Six months after this was written, “we” humane and democratic Ameri­cans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying in the twinkling of an eye some 90,000 civilians— men, women, and children. This was the climax of the Anglo-American Policy of massacring civilian populations from the air, a policy which later evidence shows to have been morally indefensible, politically disastrous, and militarily of dubious value.

Not surprisingly, in 1963, I had never encountered anything like this moral complexity. MacDonald gave me a righteous preparation for the decade of Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam -- not mention his introduction to the Catholic Worker, a New Yorker profile of Dorothy Day, also reprinted in this book.

• • •

I think I'm going to skip the Oppenheimer film; I've agonized plenty over that era and the reviews don't point me to anything new. Besides, I seldom warm to movies. In 2011, I wrote up the book the film is based on here on the blog if anyone is interested.

A 9/11 wars after-action assessment and more

In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, the highly regarded non-fiction book reviewer, has written an insightful survey of some of the literature of the War on Terror: 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Some telling excerpts; I highly recommend the whole:

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. ... 

...  In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized. It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism. 

... The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.

Lozada has chosen a valuable catalogue of horrors to highlight -- but I can't help mourning what's missing from it. In addition to these book-length journalistic critiques -- "just the facts" deeply reported if morally informed -- the "War on Terror" has left us with a vast literature in a number of genres.

• There was the deeply disillusioned, essentially conservative, military take from retired colonel Andrew Bacevich in America's War for the Greater Middle East. 

• The grunts on the ground have tried to explain what the war meant in their lives. In What It's Like to Go to War,  Karl Marlantes compares his war -- Vietnam -- with the experiences of another generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

• Joshua E.S. Phillips tells the story of U.S. soldiers and torture in a painful, caring little volume, None of Us Were Like This Before. This one deserved more visibility than it seemed to get. 

• National Book Award judges did take notice of a truly successful fictional portrait an enlisted man's mindset: Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk. Highly recommended, especially for football fans. 

Union Square, New York City, September 22, 2001.

I don't think we have yet a broad, thoughtful, book-length account of the citizen peace movement in this country against the War on Terror and its permutations. There were always nay-sayers from the first moments after 9/11, while the Towers site still smoldered. Those masks date from 2001.

In early 2008, I assembled a five part series on the peace movement for a conference of Historians Against the War. Looking these posts over more than 10 years later, they still provide a decent survey in what turned out to be still early days.

Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002  

Part Two: Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion; the antiwar movement builds some infrastructure and tries some initiatives: 2002-2003  

Part Three: Liberal elites get the bad news: U.S. has "lost" Iraq war; Presidential election subsumes activism: 2004-2005  

Part Four: Peace movement finds causes to support; Insurgent new Democrats and a counterculture emerge: 2005-2008  

Part Five: Lessons: 2001-2008

The grouplet that called itself Historians against the War now calls itself Historians for Peace and Democracy. This seems on point twenty years after 9/11.

Boasting of torture

Warning: this story is stomach turning.

Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is Donald Trump's kind of guy. He was tried in a military court for stabbing a severely injured ISIS prisoner in the neck and got off on that particular charge. But he was convicted, among other misdeeds, of posing with the corpse. [See below] The former president was easily convinced this was just the sort of behavior he wanted in the nation's fighting forces. He supported Gallagher and eventually gave him a broad pardon.

The Navy didn't want its guys running around without discipline, so it tried various measures within its jurisdiction to mark that Gallagher had crossed a line. Trump didn't like that either. The affair bounced around the chain of command, eventually leading to Trump's own chosen Navy Secretary getting booted.

At Task and Purpose, Jeff Schogol reports on Gallagher's current boasts, now that he's off the legal hook. 

... Gallagher has told “The Line” [a podcast] that the SEALs were not tending to the fighter’s injuries; rather, they decided to conduct “medical treatment on him until he’s gone.” 

“I mean, he was going to die, regardless,” Gallagher said. “We weren’t taking any prisoners." 

He also claimed that every member of his platoon, including one SEAL who later reportedly described Gallagher as “evil” to investigators, all agreed to torture the ISIS fighter to death. 

“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher said. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.” 

“I didn’t stab him,” Gallagher continued. “I didn’t stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”

We can only hope that Gallagher is boasting about torturing the prisoner to amp up his right-wing notoriety. He's found a sweet grift, being the right's favorite war criminal. Though the whole platoon is pictured here, we know some of them turned Gallagher in and called him "freaking evil."

These stories from the forever wars keep sending me back to the story of the U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Seeing the terrible stacks of prisoner bodies everywhere, their first impulse was simply to shoot every German in sight. But officers made them stop, insisted the German commanders get a trial with explicit evidence and defense lawyers -- and then quickly hanged the men convicted. This proceeding set the model for the better known Nuremberg trials. 

Warriors aren't angels but they need not be allowed to become devils either.

Choices leaders make

I am haunted by a photo. 

The location is inside the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in southern Germany, on the day in 1945 when U.S. troops fought their way inside. They found starving men and corpses all around. A train engine was hitched to 39 boxcars packed with the bodies of some 2000 prisoners. The SS camp guards had meant to hide their crimes, steaming away with the physical evidence. U.S. troops, hardened veterans who had fought their way north from Italy, just lost it.  At one confused moment, some lined SS men up against a wall and began gunning them down.

Their commander, Lt. Colonel Felix Sparks, ordered the Americans to stop shooting, holding up his hand and firing into the air. Confronted with horror, he demanded discipline.

Subsequently, Dachau became the site of the first postwar war crimes tribunal which set the legal precedents and patterns for the subsequent Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Sparks' intervention in the midst of natural human reaction to atrocity created the context for that legal process to be invented. Some number of Germans were killed, but Sparks would not allow his men to unleash their appropriate passions.

•••

Under the Trump presidency, it has repeatedly felt as if rightful order -- the rule of law, simple decency -- depended on a fragile bulwark provided by career professionals whose conception of doing their job impeded the Leader's autocratic aspirations. Most recently I pointed to the security professionals working to ensure we could have an undamaged election; one of these, Christopher Krebs, has since paid the price of doing his duty, getting fired by tweet for his honesty.

At Dachau, Lt. Colonel Sparks' adherence to his professional code interrupted what could have been mass vengeance. His soldiers' reaction to the vile house of horror they had liberated feels utterly understandable. Sparks stood apart. How does that happen?

His commanding officers certainly preferred that the troops maintain good discipline, if only because the alternative -- massacre responding to massacre -- would have led to lengthy inquiries. But somehow the leaders of the time, civilian and military, had inculcated a sense that their armies were fighting for higher purposes than necessity and survival. Even in the midst of death and destruction, many of these men believed their sacrifice was not only for their buddies and to get back to their families, but also for democracy, decency, humanity.

•••

It was empire up against other peoples' aspirations -- and Vietnam in particular -- that shattered that belief structure, I think. It had value, even if always partially delusional. Once broken, it became almost impossibly hard to reestablish, though the contemporary US military has tried pretty hard. No wonder Donald Trump had to pardon the war criminal SEAL Eddie Gallagher.

•••

I've written about Dachau before when I was surprised to discover an uncle had been a figure in that story.

Apparently Netflix has issued a new documentary about Felix Sparks' unit. I won't be watching it because I don't watch war films. H/t to an interview in Task and Purpose for introducing me to the photo.

After September 11 2001: the victims became the perpetrators

 

At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

[Brown University’s Costs of War project] report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts. ...

It was both wrong and stupid to respond to a criminal atrocity by making wars without end. We have a national responsibility, however little we want to take it up. Some of us know that.

About those war criminals

Erudite Partner is at it again, reminding us that there are -- or ought to be -- ethical and legal limits, even in war. And its not just groundlevel grunts who violate ...

Trump’s Plan to Pardon War Criminals is Outrageous, but the Higher-Ups were Never even Charged.

Read all about it!