Obama “on verge of” launching another bombing campaign in Libya, after dropping 23,144 bombs on six countries in 2015

www.salon.com|Ben Norton

The U.S. dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015 — Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The government has not officially declared war in Syria, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, but this hasn’t stopped it from bombing them, or from waging a secretive drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia for more than a decade.

Yet it appears these wars are not enough. The Obama administration is “on the verge of taking action” against ISIS in Libya, Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Politico.

Hell on Earth for Iraqis: 19,000 civilians killed in less than two years — roughly 28 per day

www.salon.com|Ben Norton

A new United Nations report paints a hellish picture of the violence that has overtaken Iraq in the wake of the U.S. war that destabilized the country.

At least 18,802 civilians were killed and 36,245 wounded in the country in the 22 months between Jan. 1, 2014, and Oct. 31, 2015, according to the Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq.

Another 3,206,736 Iraqis were internally displaced, including more than 1 million school-age children, in the 21 months from January 2014 to September 2015.

The only strategy that can defeat ISIS is one no Republican would ever embrace

www.salon.com|Peter Van Buren

How can we stop the Islamic State?

Imagine yourself shaken awake, rushed off to a strategy meeting with your presidential candidate of choice, and told: “Come up with a plan for me to do something about ISIS!” What would you say?

You’d need to start with a persuasive review of what hasn’t worked over the past 14-plus years. American actions against terrorism — the Islamic State being just the latest flavor — have flopped on a remarkable scale, yet remain remarkably attractive to our present crew of candidates. (Bernie Sanders might be the only exception, though he supports forming yet another coalition to defeat ISIS.)

Scholars expose Iraq War supporters’ most absurd claim yet: No, Saddam didn’t create ISIS

www.salon.com|Ben Norton

It is now common knowledge that the destructive U.S. war in Iraq is one of the primary factors that led to the rise of ISIS.

Washington began its almost nine-year war by “de-Baathifying” and completely dissolving the Iraqi government. In the years that followed, U.S. support for an autocratic Shia-led government and brutally violent Shia militias instigated a sectarian civil war in a country in which Sunnis and Shias had long lived as neighbors.

More than 1 million Iraqis died in the war, according to a study authored by the Nobel Prize-winning medical organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “And this is only a conservative estimate,” the report notes.

A party of Kissingers and Cheneys: The GOP has become a collection of aspiring war criminals

www.salon.com|Rebecca Gordon

They’re back!

From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time — and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted.

The false resurrection of George W. Bush: Don’t be fooled by calls to reassess his loathsome legacy

www.salon.com|Paul Blest

The Republican primary has proved that former president George W. Bush had something fifteen years ago that his younger brother Jeb does not: likability and an ability to connect on a personal level with white middle-class Americans, despite the fact that he was born into a family of massive political influence, the most successful political dynasty this country has ever seen, and enormous wealth.

In the years after Bush left office, where he sported a 37 percent approval rating over the course of his second term, he’s done a remarkable job rebuilding his personal reputation back up somewhat in this same way, even with the liberals who vehemently opposed his policies during his administration.

Jeb’s new Iraq war: Continuing the family tradition of bloody Middle East quagmires

www.salon.com|Simon Maloy

In a big speech yesterday at the Citadel in South Carolina, Jeb Bush announced that he, if elected to the White House, would be the third President Bush to deploy American forces to fight a war in Iraq and the Middle East. Jeb’s speech was a response to the ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris, which hardened the resolve among Republican lawmakers that the U.S. must deepen its military involvement in the fight against the Islamic State and take a more active role in bringing an end to the Syrian civil war.

This is obviously an awkward position for Jeb to be in. He wants to reinvade Iraq to defeat ISIS, which grew out of al-Qaida in Iraq, which did not exist until his brother invaded the country. He’s now coming before the country promising that one Bush-led international military coalition will fix what the last Bush-led international military coalition left broken. Unfortunately for us, Jeb wasn’t especially forthcoming with any details as to how this would work.

No, really, I’ll only vote for Bernie Sanders — and Paris helps explain why

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for Bernie Sanders and I'm not going to waste it

www.salon.com|H.A. Goodman

On war and foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is a Republican. It’s doubtful that with neoconservative influences and a “neocon” foreign policy that Hillary Clinton would refrain from sending Americans back to Middle Eastern quagmires. If you disagree with me, just remember that she evoked 9/11 when asked about Wall Street donors.

America is still paying for its wars: The enduring catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan

www.salon.com|Tom Engelhardt

Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S.  The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003.  Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon.  And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It’s never ended.  In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security.”  It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard.  In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems.

“The horror makes the thrill”: Why the New York Times’ “beautiful” war images of death and destruction won’t change many minds

www.salon.com|John Pettegrew

The great Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James said it best.  Speaking during the first decade of the last century, he warned that turning away from massive-scale industrial warfare “is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”  War has evolved into something “absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity,” James counseled, but don’t assume that documenting its “expensiveness and horror” will change many minds: “The horror makes the thrill.”

James’ intuition covers all too much of the human condition, including the early-21st century American inability to see war for what it is.  This base incapacity comes into clear view in the book “War Is Beautiful,” a decade-long compendium of front-page war photographs from the New York Times along with author David Shields’ commentary on how the newspaper has been complicit in selling the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts via its “pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection.” The Times’ photo-editing process is a manipulative act, Shields charges:  It’s taken military conflict’s massive death and destruction and “filtered” that “reality” into the stuff of art, images for the eye to behold rather than take in as abject lessons in historic catastrophe.

Henry Kissinger’s genocidal legacy: Vietnam, Cambodia and the birth of American militarism

www.salon.com|Greg Grandin

In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death.

As a journalist, Power had made her name as a defender of human rights, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.Having served on the National Security Council before moving on to the U.N., she was considered an influential “liberal hawk” of the Obama era. She was also a leading light among a set of policymakers and intellectuals who believe that American diplomacy should be driven not just by national security and economic concerns but by humanitarian ideals, especially the advancement of democracy and the defense of human rights.

www.salon.com

You may not know it, but you’re living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that’s a fact.  If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness.  Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside).  But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.

Let me start with one of the odder moments we’ve lived through and give it the attention it’s always deserved.  If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you’ll end up back exactly where we are — in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history.

To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let’s return to late September 2001.  I’m sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

I couldn’t resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that’s happened since, including the establishment of a terror “caliphate” by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps — all of which you wouldn’t believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apes look like outright realism.

Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” or “a new Day of Infamy,” and the attackers “the kamikazes of the twenty-first century.”  Remember the moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the rubble at “Ground Zero” in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and swore paybackin the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu crowd shouted out things like “Go get ‘em, George!”

“I can hear you! I can hear you!” he responded. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

“USA!  USA!  USA!” chanted the crowd.

Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, “Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.”  By then, he was already talking about “our war on terror.”

Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger.  As CNN put it at the time, “President Bush… urged Americans to travel, spend, and enjoy life.” 

So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying.

www.salon.com

The idiosyncratic Seattle-based writer David Shields was startled as he followed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the New York Times’ visual representation. “At least once a week I would be enchanted and infuriated by these images, and I wanted to understand why,” he writes in the introduction to his new book. So he spent months going over every front page war photo since the wars began — more than 1,00 images.

The result of his inquiry is “War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.” It’s a twisted kind of coffee-table book: Most of “War is Beautiful” reproduces the newspaper’s images, one per page, in between brief pieces by Shields and art critic Dave Hickey, who argues that “combat photographs today are so profoundly touched in the process of bringing them out, that they amount to corporate folk art … They are no longer ‘lifelike,’ but rather ‘picture-like.’”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has apologized for backing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he admitted led to the rise of ISIS. Expressing reserved regret for what he described as “mistakes” made in the war, Blair conceded that “you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., leading right-wing politicians are still stuck in denial. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has firmly maintained that his brother’s war was a “good deal” because it led to the ouster of Saddam Hussein. He furthermore described the 2007 surge of U.S. troops in Iraq as “courageous.”

www.salon.com

The VA Southern Oregon Rehabilitation Center & Clinics (SORCC) was on the left at the last of three stoplights that move traffic along through White City on Crater Lake Highway 62, heading from Medford, Oregon, to Shady Cove. White City began as Camp White, established in 1941 as an Army training facility for the 91st Infantry Division during World War II.

The military commandeered over seventy-seven square miles for the base, which briefly served as a German POW camp, and provided training for more than 110,000 troops. Dozens of bunkers were built to stage exercises for machine gun crews, and the gray cement pillboxes squatting in the pastures provided a stark structural backdrop for the cattle grazing peacefully around them. When the war ended, the military hospital and barracks were turned over to the Veterans Administration and reopened as the only free-standing domiciliary in the country. We lived about eleven miles away, as the crow flies, on what was once the old artillery training field, and the hardpan pasture and old white oak trees still spit out the occasional casing or bullet.

www.salon.com

In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.