Memorial Day was originally a holiday to honor the Union dead in the Civil War. They should not be forgotten. The painting below illustrates the Battle of Gettysburg, with Union defenders on the left, Confederate attackers on the right.
A Memorial Day War Nerd: Gettysburg Was The Finest Fight Ever in the World by John Dolan, aka Gary Brecher, for The eXiled.
My sixth most-viewed post is about a warning in 2011 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to European allies to pay their proportionate share of the cost of the NATO military alliance.
This is much the same as what President Trump is saying now.
I thought then, and I still think, that members of the European Union are strong enough and wealthy enough to protect themselves without relying on the USA. I thought then, and I still think, that this would be a good thing.
But if the Europeans paid for their own defense, they might be less willing to follow the U.S. lead in military policy. And, maybe more importantly, they might be less willing to buy their weapons from American manufacturers.
The advantage of paying the piper means that you get to call the tune.
Prince Salman meets with President Trump in March
The young new ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Salman bin Mohammad, is trying to organize an alliance of Sunni Muslim nations against Shiite Iran.
And President Donald Trump is expected to endorse an anti-Iranian “Arab NATO” during his forthcoming visit to Saudi Arabia.
This is a terrible idea. It doesn’t benefit Americans and it risks a war that would be disastrous for both Americans and people in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is an enormously wealthy nation, but it is thinly populated and militarily weak. It depends on the United States for its defense. In return, the Saudis buy billions of dollars in armaments from American companies and pump oil in sufficient quantities to keep world oil prices low.
So the United States since the 1970s has sided with Saudi Arabia and also Israel against their geopolitical rivals in the region. Once Saudi Arabia’s chief rival and threat was Iraq. Now it is Iran.
This has nothing to do with making Americans safe from terrorism, and everything to do with promoting the strategic and economic interests of Saudi Arabia.
President Donald Trump has called for a military buildup, which would mean more aircraft carriers, more nuclear submarines, more high-tech weapons of all kinds.
A military analyst named Daniel Gouré wondered whether the United States has the industrial base needed for such a buildup.
For the Army, this means moving forward with near-term modernization and improvements to its existing fleets of tanks, fighting vehicles, artillery, rotorcraft, and rockets. For the Air Force, it is reaching an economic rate of F-35 production as soon as possible. For the Navy, it is all about the numbers of Virginia-class SSNs, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Ford-class aircraft carriers, LX(R) amphibious warfare ships, and small combatants (Littoral Combat Ship or new Small Surface Combatant). Without question, a military buildup will require lots of dollars for defense.
But unless the industrial base is prepared to accelerate production, all the money in the world will not produce the desired results.
Source: RealClearDefense
Do we have the industrial base? U.S. military power depends on U.S. high-tech manufacturing, and the U.S. manufacturing base is declining and dependent on foreign imports. The U.S. depends on China and other foreign countries for many key electronic components. The U.S. depends on imports even for basic raw materials such as steel.
We have had two contradictory policies—a industrial policy that accepts U.S. dependence on global supply chains, and a military interventionist policy that depends on U.S. technological superiority.
This contradiction did not originate with President Trump, but it is now his responsibility to deal with it.
High tariffs on imports, as proposed by Trump, won’t solve this problem—at least not overnight. The hollowing out of the U.S. manufacturing base has been going on for years, and rebuilding it won’t be accomplished overnight.
President Trump reportedly hopes that cruise missile attack Syria and the 11-ton MOAB bomb dropped on Afghanistan will make American threats more credible when he deals with North Korea and other hostile countries.
But it is not enough for a leader of a great nation to be able to make credible threats. He also has to be able to make credible promises.
It is not enough for foreign heads of state to feel in danger if they oppose the United States. They have to be able to feel safe from U.S. wrath if they cooperate with the United States.
Otherwise the threats will make them redouble their efforts to be able to strike back.
Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad all found that appeasing the United States was more dangerous than defiance.
Unfortunately for President Trump, he—for reasons not of his own making—is in a situation in which neither his threats nor his promises are credible.
Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a series of reports that convincingly debunk the claim that the Syrian government attacked civilians with sarin two weeks ago.
He said, among other things, that—
The video evidence shows workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack that were wearing clothing with the logo “Idlib Health Directorate.”
These individuals were photographed putting dead birds from a birdcage into plastic bags. The implication of these actions was that the birds had died after being placed in the alleged sarin crater.
However, the video also shows the same workers inside and around the same crater with no protection of any kind against sarin poisoning. These individuals were wearing honeycomb face masks and medical exam gloves. They were otherwise dressed in normal streetwear and had no protective clothing of any kind.
The honeycomb face masks would provide absolutely no protection against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols. The masks are only designed to filter small particles from the air. If there were sarin vapor, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals. If the sarin were in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the pours in the masks, and would have evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the individuals inhaled through the mask. It is difficult to believe that such health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these basic facts.
In addition, other people dressed as health workers were standing around the crater without any protection at all.
I don’t know for sure what happened. What Prof. Postol’s report proves is that President Trump committed an act of war against a sovereign nation for reasons not supported by evidence. Although the attack resulted in relatively few casualties and little damage, it may well have destroyed the possibility of peace with Syria and Russia.
Glenn Greenwald, on The Intercept, said pretty well everything that needs to be said about President Trump’s attack on Syria.
LINK
The Spoils of War: Trump Lavished With Media and Bipartisan Praise for Bombing Syria by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept. Hat tip to peteybee.
Click to enlarge.
We Americans like the spectacle of war, but, since the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam Conflict, only a small minority of us has had an appetite for actual fighting.
President Donald Trump’s attack on Syria shows that he understands this. It was a kind of minimalist attack. The Syrian government was given a general notice that an attack was coming, and the Russian government a specific attack, so that casualties and damage were minimal.
Except for the unfortunate Syrian troops who were killed, this was war theater, not war.
Yet he got credit for acting decisively. Deeply unpopular before, he has been applauded by the press, Congress and even Hillary Clinton, while even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren equivocated. All the speculative news about Trump conspiring with Putin has vanished from the front pages.
I fear Trump has learned a bad lesson. When unpopular, rally Americans by attacking a designated foreign enemy. But since these attacks won’t change anything, he’ll have do something each time that is more impressive than what he did the time before, which means a higher risk of sliding from token war into general war.
I don’t think that Trump scared Bashar al Assad, Hassan Rouhani, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-on. I think they understand what is going on very well. I don’t think they can be bluffed or intimidated. As my father said, never start a fight you are not prepared to finish.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon and a self-described expert on persuasion, thinks that the best way for President Trump to respond to fake news about Syrian gas attacks is by means of a fake response—
The reason the Assad government would bomb its own people with a nerve agent right now is obvious. Syrian President Assad – who has been fighting for his life for several years, and is only lately feeling safer – suddenly decided to commit suicide-by-Trump.
Scott Adams
Because the best way to make that happen is to commit a war crime against your own people in exactly the way that would force President Trump to respond or else suffer humiliation at the hands of the mainstream media.
And how about those pictures coming in about the tragedy. Lots of visual imagery. Dead babies.
It is almost as if someone designed this “tragedy” to be camera-ready for President Trump’s consumption. It pushed every one of his buttons. Hard. And right when things in Syria were heading in a positive direction.
- Interesting timing.
- Super-powerful visual persuasion designed for Trump in particular.
- Suspiciously well-documented event for a place with no real press.
- No motive for Assad to use gas to kill a few dozen people at the cost of his entire regime. It wouldn’t be a popular move with Putin either.
- The type of attack no U.S. president can ignore and come away intact.
- A setup that looks suspiciously similar to the false WMD stories that sparked the Iraq war.
I’m going to call bullshit on the gas attack. It’s too “on-the-nose,” as Hollywood script-writers sometimes say, meaning a little too perfect to be natural. This has the look of a manufactured event.
My guess is that President Trump knows this smells fishy, but he has to talk tough anyway. However, keep in mind that he has made a brand out of not discussing military options. He likes to keep people guessing. He reminded us of that again yesterday, in case we forgot.
So how does a Master Persuader respond to a fake war crime?
He does it with a fake response, if he’s smart.
Source: Scott Adams’ Blog.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
Back in 2003, I thought the U.S. invasion of Iraq might be a good idea.
I thought we Americans could atone for all the suffering we had caused the Iraqi people by the low-level war by the Clinton administration by overthrowing the evil tyrant Saddam—and, yes, he really was evil and a tyrant—and allowing the Iraqis to choose their own government.
The United States would then, so I thought, have a democratic ally in the Middle East whose people were genuinely pro-American, and would free ourselves from dependence on the Saudi monarchy.
The U.S. invasion made things worse, both from the standpoint of the Iraqi people and of us Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, hundreds of thousands became refugees.
Maybe there would have been a different result if the U.S. occupation authorities’ priorities had not been to get control of Iraqi oil and create money-making opportunities for American contractors.
We have to recognize that policy is going to be carried out by the government we’ve got, not the government we wish we had.
I think an invasion of Syria would have the same bad result as the invasion of Iraq.
I think a stepped-up bombing campaign in Syria would increase the suffering of the Syrian people, but would not punish the individuals responsible for the gas attacks—if such attacks occurred.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley states as a fact that the Syrian government used poison gas (probably sarin) against civilians in its fight against rebels. I question this because: —
Haley’s speech reminds me of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations back in 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. We now know that this was just an excuse to invade Iraq, a nation that never threatened the United States but was feared by the leaders of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Iraq war united most of us Americans behind President George W. Bush, at least for a time, but in the end it helped create the backlash that led to the election of Barack Obama.
Donald Trump was one who came to understand what big mistake it was to invade Iraq. He also said it would be a big mistake to intervene in Syria in 2013. He was right both times. Those are two reasons I thought he might be less of a war hawk than Hillary Clinton.
Now he seems eager to go to war. He now criticizes the Obama administration from holding back on going to war in 2013 in similar circumstances.
Will Washington Risk WW3 to Block an Emerging Russia-EU Superstate? by Mike Whitney for Counterpunch.
From Russia, With Panic: Cozy bears, unsourced hacks—and a Silicon Valley shakedown by Yasha Levine for The Baffler. It’s a bit long, but well worth reading in its entirety.
During the election campaign, I wrote that Donald Trump is intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit to be President of the United States. Nothing since then has changed my mind.
But it is not as if Trump overturned a well-functioning system. The United States was already committed to perpetual war and rule by Wall Street.
My friend Bill Elwell called my attention to an article by Tom Engelhardt, who wrote in part:
Odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump’s presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.
Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history. He’s unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics and governance.
In that sense, to generalize (if you’ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise.
After all, it’s clearly a government of, by and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we’ve been heading for the last decade and a half anyway.
Let’s start with those generals. In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business and Congress (in that descending order). […]
The following is an open letter to Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, signed by David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and others. The Bertrand Russell Society, of which I am a member, endorses it.
This may be the most dangerous time in human history.
In a dramatic recent decision, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its iconic Doomsday Clock ahead from three minutes to only two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.
Humankind faces two existential challenges of global and potentially apocalyptic scope: nuclear weapons and climate change.
Our focus here is on nuclear dangers, but we strongly encourage you, Presidents Trump and Putin, to undertake in a spirit of urgency all necessary steps to avert further global warming.
As the leaders of the United States and Russia, the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, you have the grave responsibility of assuring that nuclear weapons are not used — or their use overtly threatened — during your period of leadership.
The most certain and reliable way to fulfill this responsibility is to negotiate with each other, and the other governments of nuclear-armed states, for their total elimination.
The U.S. and Russia are both obligated under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in such negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for complete nuclear disarmament. Your success in this endeavor would make you heroes of the Nuclear Age.
The darker the red, the greater the willingness to fight.
Only 44 percent of adult Americans are willing to tell pollsters they’d fight for their country.
The percentage is even less for some U.S. allies, such as Canada (30%), France (29%), the United Kingdom (27%), Italy (30%), Germany (18%) and Japan (11%).
In contrast, 71 percent of Chinese and 59 percent of Russians say they’d fight for their countries.
This is the result of a public opinion poll of more than 1,000 people in each of 64 countries in late 2014 by WIN / Gallup International. The complete results are below.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I think it partly depends on people mean by “fight for country”.
I think almost all Americans would be willing to fight to defend our nation from an invader. I think only a minority are willing to go to some foreign country to fight to increase U.S. geopolitical power.
The problem for us Americans is that someday U.S. power will begin to slip, and countries that now fear to go against the United States will become our enemies.
When that backlash comes, our nation will need the patriotism that our leaders now exploit and abuse.
Steve Bannon is President Trump’s most trusted adviser. He is the second most powerful person in the Trump administration.
He is guided by a dangerously wrong philosophy.
He thinks that Judeo-Christian civilization is at war with the Moslem world abroad, and with secularists and Muslims at home.
He expects a shooting war with China and as well as a shooting war in the Middle East.
He sees himself as part of a global nationalist movement that includes the United Kingdom Independence Party, the National Front in France and similar movements across Europe.
He has expressed admiration for Lenin and Karl Rove, and has compared himself to Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.
Trump owes him. He and Jared Kushner, through their skilled use of data mining and social media, are responsible for Trump’s victory in the 2016 Election.
His idea that Americans are engaged in both a civil war and a global war could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
∞∞∞
Steve Bannon, born in 1953, has had a varied career as U.S. Naval officer, mergers and acquisitions specialist for Goldman Sachs, and executive producer in Hollywood. He has degrees from Virginia Tech, Georgetown University and Harvard University.
He was a little-known but influential figure even before he joined the Trump campaign. Among his films are documentaries on Ronald Reagan, Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin and an expose of Occupy Wall Street. He was on the board of directors of Breitbart News and became executive chair when founder Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Another Bannon organization sponsored opposition research on Hillary Clinton which resulted in the book, Clinton Cash, and many articles in mainstream newspapers about the Clintons’ conflicts of interest.
President-elect Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress say they want to cancel the agreement for controls on Iran’s nuclear program.
This would have two bad results.
Iran and its neighbors
It would strengthen the hard-liners in Iran who want their country to have nuclear weapons capability, and who opposed the agreement in the first-place.
It would undermine one of Trump’s announced goals, which is to form an alliance dedicated to fighting the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL), Al Qaeda and their offshoots.
Juan Cole, a historian of the Middle East, reported that many Iranians are happy about the election of Trump. Trump is friendly with Iran’s ally, Russia, and wants to aid another Iranian ally, the Assad government in Syria, against its enemies, the Sunni extremist rebels fighting Syria.
So if the United States is an ally of Iran’s allies, and an enemy of its enemies, the U.S. should be an ally of Iran. Isn’t that logical?
And, in any case, resuming sanctions against Iran would not produce a better deal.
President Obama seems hell-bent on spending his 20 remaining days in office in pushing the United States into a cyber-war with Russia.
In terms of domestic partisan politics, this may be smart. Foreign policy toward Russia is a wedge issue between Republican war hawks in Congress and President-elect Donald Trump.
In terms of the national interest, this is irresponsible as well as improper.
Much of the U.S. press it takes for granted that Russian intelligence services obtained confidential DNC e-mails and transferred the information to Wikileaks. This may or may not be true.
The determination as to what happened and what to do about it should be made by the incoming administration, which will have the responsibility for dealing with the consequences.
I do not have confidence in President-elect Trump’s judgment, but he does have sense enough to see that there is no fundamental conflict of interest between Russia and the USA (except maybe over access to the oil and gas resources of the Arctic, which is not currently an issue).
One good thing which I hoped to see in a Trump administration was a détente with Russia.
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and in her campaign record seemed hell-bent on a military confrontation with Russia, the one country with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States, over issues that matter very little to the American people.
It looks like this hope will be fulfilled. Unfortunately Trump seems hell-bent on a military confrontation with China, and also with Iran. This, too, could turn out badly for the United States and everybody else, although for different reasons.
President Trump isn’t even in office yet, and his lifetime success strategy is based on being unpredictable, so I don’t claim to be able to foresee what he will do.
But based on his appointments and his rhetoric, it appears as if he intends to intensify the “pivot to Asia” begun under the Obama administration.
The anti-Russia policy was based on economic sanctions, covert war and a military buildup to force Russia into a destructive arms race. It appears as though an anti-China policy will be the same.
The problem with this, from the U.S. standpoint, is that China is a stronger economic power than the United States. By some measures, it has a larger gross domestic product. It has a stronger manufacturing economy. The United States has a trade deficit with China. The U.S. government probably could finance its budget deficit without selling some of its Treasury bonds to China, but it would be more difficult.
Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker for the BBC who uses archival footage to remind viewers of forgotten facts and to make connections that others wouldn’t see.
This documentary does not quite add up to a connected whole, but within it is a fascinating history of the evolution of suicide bombing, starting with the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1982, the Iran-Iraq war, Palestinian terrorism, the 9-11 attacks and Islamic State (ISIS) terrorism.
Along with it is a history of American and British deception and self-deception in their policies toward Syria and Libya.
Suicide bombing, according to Curtis, as a military tactic by Syria’s ruler Hafiz al-Assad to offset American military power in his region. Now it is used by ISIS to sow sectarian strife in Iraq and Syria, and bring down Assad’s son, Bashir al-Assad.
He documents how Muammar Qaddafi was set up by American policy-makers as a scapegoat for the crimes of Hafiz al-Assad because he was a more vulnerable foe.
This film is not the whole story of recent Middle Eastern history. Curtis appears to think that the American and British governments seriously intended to bring democracy to the Middle East, for example. But he brings out many fascinating facts, some forgotten and some new (at least to me).
I recommend viewing just those parts of the documentary dealing with Syria, suicide bombing and the Middle East, and fast-forwarding through the rest, which consists of disconnected material about Curtis’s long-term concerns about technological manipulation, technological utopianism and the decline of the democratic process.
Click on HyperNormalization if the YouTube version doesn’t work. Click on The Century of the Self and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace for Curtis’s best documentaries about his meta concerns.
Election 2016 and the Growing Nuclear Threat by Michael T. Klare for TomDispatch.
During the whole of the Cold War, American and Soviet troops never faced each other on the battlefield. Both sides feared possible escalation into nuclear war.
If the United States proclaims a “no fly” zone in Syria or sends troops to create a “safe zone” for anti-Assad forces, there is a real danger of a shooting war between the United States and Russia.
The United States and Russia are the only two nations with enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other. Presumably leaders of neither nation want this, but who knows what a direct Russian-American conflict could escalate into? And for what?
LINKS
Making Sense of the Russian Task Force Off Syria by The Saker, a pro-Russian blogger.
Is the US Headed Towards War in Syria?, an interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the Real News Network.
Looking Ahead: Clinton’s Plans for Syria by Peter Van Buren for We Meant Well.
Fact Check: Trump Is Right That Clinton Might Cause WW3 by Carl Herman on Washington’s Blog.
