The atrocities will continue: No matter who wins the presidency, the Middle East loses

www.salon.com|Tom Engelhardt

One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had readWilliam Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in on or otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens — imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century — but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world?  This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine.

He cries for Americans alone: Our wars and violence destroy families — those kids deserve Obama’s tears too

www.salon.com|Ben Norton

At news conference Tuesday, Obama announced he’s taking executive action to address gun violence. Tears fell from his eyes as he dramatically spoke of the tragedy, as he lamented that American children are dying.

But what of all the countless other children killed by the U.S. government, overseen by the Obama administration? Do they not get tears too?

Gun violence is a horrific problem in the U.S., and Obama is right; it is not normal. No other country has such an extremely high incidence of gun violence. If there is an element of truth to the myth of American exceptionalism, it is that America is exceptionally violent.

And there is no doubt that Obama’s tears are genuine. It is indeed a horrific tragedy that American children — or anyone else — has to die from senseless gun violence. The president no doubt feels genuine remorse at this deplorable reality.

But genuineness and moral hypocrisy are not mutually exclusive; one can feel genuine sympathy about one form of injustice or oppression while ignoring or even actively carrying out another.

President Obama promised countless times he would end the war in Afghanistan by 2014. He was reelected on the promise — which he subsequently broke, twice, instead further entrenching the U.S. military occupation of the South Asian country.

In 2014, the Obama administration announced that it would not just be delaying U.S. withdrawal; it would in fact also be expanding the U.S. role in the war. In 2015, the Obama administration said U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan until 2017.

Some politicians, including Sen. John McCain, have called for a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, which has geostrategical importance, will be part of the TAPI natural gas pipeline, and contains trillions of dollars worth of natural resources.

Throughout 2015, the U.S. led a coalition of countries that are carrying out airstrikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

A French journalist formerly held captive by ISIS has claimed that the U.S.-led bombing campaign is “pushing people into the hands of ISIS,” rather than weakening it. “Strikes on ISIS are a trap,” he warned. “We are just fueling our enemies and fueling the misery, the disaster, for the local people.”

American intelligence agencies and experts have admitted that the U.S.-led war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS is not effective, despite the Pentagon spending an average of $9.4 million every day on airstrikes.

Civil war erupted in Syria in 2011. The armed conflict, which is still ongoing, and is now approaching its fifth year, has been nothing short of catastrophic.

4.4 million Syrian refugees are registered with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. More than half of the  population of Syria has been displaced in the ongoing war.

More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict, and entire cities have been reduced to rubble, from constant government bombing and rebel fighting.

Since March, the U.S. has backed a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries in their war on Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.

Thousands of Yemenis have been killed in the war, including hundreds of children. Tens of thousands have been injured. An average of 25 Yemenis were killed every day throughout the nine-month war.

The Western-backed coalition seeks to reinstate President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. It is fighting Houthi rebels, who have received some weapons and support from Iran — although the extent to which it has is disputed — and fighters loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Hadi claims the Houthi rebels are puppets of Iran; the rebels characterize Hadi as a puppet of Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

More than 9,000 people have been killed in the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, according to the U.N. At least 20,000 more have been injured.

In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, which was internationally recognized to be Ukrainian territory. Crimea has a Russian-majority population that voted in support of the annexation.

War subsequently broke out in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists fought pro-Russian separatists throughout 2015.

An uprising in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel broke out in October 2015. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers from October to the beginning of December. Nineteen Israelis were killed in the same time period.

The Palestinian uprising has been widely characterized as the “Third Intifada,” or the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” referring to the Jerusalem mosque around which much of the tension has flared. Some far-right Israeli groups and religious extremists want to destroy al-Aqsa, which is the third-holiest site of Islam and is also an important Jewish site, known as the Temple Mount, and reserve it solely for Jews.

Yet the conflict is not religious at its core. Many Palestinians are protesting the continued Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and the Israeli siege on Gaza.

The U.S. has waged a drone war in Pakistan for more than a decade. From 2004 to 2015, the U.S. drone war killed up to 4,000 people in Pakistan, one-fourth of whom could have been civilians, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The exact number of civilians killed in this war is unknown. According to the U.S. military, a “militant” is defined as a male of military age. This ambiguous definition makes it difficult to determine how many civilians are killed.

Secret government documents leaked to The Intercept by a whistleblower in 2015 show that 90 percent of people killed in U.S. drone strikes in a five-month period in provinces on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan were not the intended targets.

ISIS’ use of beheading as a military tactic has attracted a lot of media attention, but drug gangs and far-right paramilitaries in Central America have used such tactics for years. Some scholars have even gone so far as to claim that Central American drug gangs and far-right paramilitaries are worse than ISIS.

The drug war in Mexico in particular reached a new height in 2015. The U.S. has long worked with the notoriously corrupt Mexican government to fight drug gangs. In the process, not only have civilians been killed; the Mexican government has itself committed atrocities.

43 student activists from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were kidnapped in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in September 2014. The government claimed the students were kidnapped by a drug gang, but many media reports have found government connections to the presumed mass killing.

The U.S. expanded military aid to the Nigerian government in 2015 and is working with it in its fight against Boko Haram, an extremist Islamist militia.

In 2015, Boko Haram declared loyalty to ISIS. Although more attention has been on ISIS, Boko Haram has carried out numerous massacres of civilians.

Boko Haram was in fact declared the deadliest terrorist group in 2015. In 2014, it killed more than 6,600 people, the vast majority civilians.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped push for the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, which overthrow dictator Muammar Qadhafi and destroyed the government, leaving a power vacuum that is yet to be filled.

Amid the chaos, ISIS has expanded into Libya.

Throughout 2015, a variety of militant groups fought for control of the country. The internationally recognized government in the east is fighting ISIS affiliates in the north, along with more moderate Muslim Brotherhood-aligned rebels in the northwest, and tribal militias in the southwest.

Everything you know about Osama bin Laden’s killing is wrong. That’s the short version of a very long Seymour Hersh story, just published in the London Review of Books, which offers an alternative narrative of the killing of Bin Laden in 2011. The slightly longer version is that two key Pakistani officials, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the Pakistan’s intelligence service, were in on the operation to kill Bin Laden and ensured U.S. helicopters could travel safely across the border from Afghanistan into airspace over key Pakistani security facilities. They did so, Hersh’s story goes, in exchange for both personal bribes and a resumption of US military funding to Pakistan. That part is all too easy to believe.

In the twenty-first-century world of drone warfare, one question with two aspects reigns supreme: Who counts? In Washington, the answers are the same: We don’t count and they don’t count. The Obama administration has adamantly refused to count. Not a body. In fact, for a long time, American officials associated with Washington’s drone assassination campaigns and “signature strikes” in the backlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen claimed that there were no bodies to count, that the CIA’s drones were so carefully handled and so “precise” that they never produced an unmeant corpse — not a child, not a parent, not a wedding party. Nada.

The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.