The Price of ‘Freedom’? US Drone Massacres Dozens of Afghan Farmers as They Slept

Matt AGORIST

Imagine for a moment that you had just finished a long day’s work with two hundred other farmers. You were settling down to relax for the night, when out of nowhere, Hellfire missiles rain down from drones in the sky and blow up dozens of your coworkers, maiming and tearing limbs from dozens more. Imagine if this happened inside the United States. Imagine the reaction from politicians and the US war machine looking to right this wrong.

Would you, as an American citizen sit idly back and accept the excuse given by the country who carried out that attack? Would you accept the wholesale slaughter of your fellow citizens by the dozen if the country who led the attack said it was a mistake and we did it to “help” you? What if it was one of your children killed in the attack? Or your brother, sister, father, mother, or grand parent? Would you simply accept that this slaughter was a mistake and the “help” you are receiving from this country is worth it?

Well, that is exactly what the United States is asking Afghanistan to do right now after a drone strike Wednesday night slaughtered 30 innocent civilian farmers as they rested from a long day’s work picking pine nuts. The attack also left 40 others maimed and mangled.

“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.

According to Reuters, a survivor of the drone strike said about 200 laborers were sleeping in five tents pitched near the farm when the attack happened.

“Some of us managed to escape, some were injured but many were killed,” said Juma Gul, a resident of northeastern Kunar province who had traveled along with laborers to harvest and shell pine nuts this week.

Naturally, the US is responding to the situation with a canned response and refusing to accept responsibility.

“U.S. forces conducted a drone strike against Da’esh (IS) terrorists in Nangarhar,” said Colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “We are aware of allegations of the death of non-combatants and are working with local officials to determine the facts.”

Residents of the Nangarhar province spoke publicly Thursday and demanded the U.S. take responsibility for this murder.

“Such mistakes cannot be justified. American forces must realize (they) will never win the war by killing innocent civilians,” said Javed Mansur, a resident of Jalalabad city.

Indeed.

This slaughter comes on the heels of a rather disturbing report released by the United Nations in April detailing how in the first part of 2019, US forces and their allies killed more civilians than the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

According to the most recent UN data, Afghan civilians were killed in greater numbers by NATO and pro-government security forces in the first three months of 2019 than by armed militants. Half of those slaughtered by allied troops were women and children.

In spite of countless drone bombs raining down from the skies, Hellfire and Tomahawk missiles flattening buildings, and mass graves filled with collateral damage, the US has absolutely nothing to show for it except physically and psychologically damaged veterans and a massive trillion dollar debt.

The Congressional Research Service, for example, concluded in 2015 that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost U.S. taxpayers $1.6 trillion. However, according to a report from TIME magazine last year, that number is a gross underestimate.

As TFTP previously reported, according to an analysis from the “Costs of War Project” from Brown University’s Watson Institute, by the end of 2018, the U.S. War on Terror cost America taxpayers more than $5.6 trillion, which is an average of $23,386 per taxpayer.

As of late September 2017, the United States wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and the additional spending on Homeland Security, and the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs since the 9/11 attacks totaled more than $4.3 trillion in current dollars through FY2017. Adding likely costs for FY2018 and estimated future spending on veterans, the costs of war total more than $5.6 trillion.

As The Nation noted, that estimate does not include several factors such as “the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably—in these years, almost uniquely—bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called ‘national security.’”

After 18 years, there is no sign that the War on Terror is ending anytime soon, but surely the United States is finally close to defeating Al Qaeda—right?

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. A report from the Los Angeles Times noted that in 2018, “Al Qaeda may be stronger than ever,” and instead of destroying the group, “U.S. policies in the Mideast appear to have encouraged its spread.”

The group has amassed the largest fighting force in its existence. Estimates say it may have more than 20,000 militants in Syria and Yemen alone. It boasts affiliates across North Africa, the Levant and parts of Asia, and it remains strong around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

While Al Qaeda may have started out as a small terrorist group, it has now grown into a massive network that is flourishing in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya—all countries where the U.S. has actively carried out bombing campaigns in recent years. Coincidence? Not at all.

Ask yourself this question, how many future terrorists did the United States create yesterday? Do you think that the children of those slain by a decade of bombing and constant threats of drone strikes will simply forget about the atrocities inflicted upon them? Do you think that the parents who watched their babies blown apart by predator drones, or the hospital workers who watched as US bombs rained down from the sky — will just turn the other cheek?

In reality, the US War on Terror has had the opposite effect on “fighting terrorists.” It is creating them. For the last 18 years, the US has actually been planting a garden in which a million Osama Bin Ladens would grow.

The truth is that since 9/11, the US and their NATO allies have fostered a breeding ground for extremist and fundamentalist groups. As Americans have sat back and said nothing over the last two decades, the military industrial complex was sowing the seeds for perpetual war, which left unchecked will inevitably lead to the demise of the American empire or total human annihilation—whichever comes first.

activistpost.com

Why America’s Military Capabilities Are Failing

Eric ZUESSE

On 17 January 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower famously introduced the phrase “military-industrial complex”, referring to what he said might become a threat to American democracy — a takeover of the US Government by a “complex,” composed of generals and other national-security brass on the one side, and corporations such as Lockheed and their financiers, on the other. That warning turned out to have been prophetic. The revolving door, between the military top brass and the boardrooms of the arms-contractors and associated corporations and think tanks, spins ever-faster now, and it controls the news-media and the US Government ever-more, so as to produce more and more invasions, of countries that never had invaded, nor even threatened to invade, us. Such “aggressive wars” (unprovoked aggressions) are international war crimes, but are never prosecuted when the US does them. The threat that Eisenhower talked of was real, and it has actually won out against, and defeated, democracy in America, and it has since become a catastrophe, taking up more and more of the US Government’s resources, and delivering — to the people of the United States, and especially to the world-at-large — only more wars, and bloodshed, and poverty, and suffering, and less security, for everyone, but with increasing wealth for the few at America’s top, who have invested in this permanent militarization of the United States.

The chief beneficiaries have been owners of the arms-makers (such as Lockheed Martin) and of the fossil-fuels extraction firms (such as ExxonMobil). Controlling those types of firms is to participate in controlling the US Government, because the US Government serves those firms. Also, high-tech, such as Amazon corporation (whose cloud-computing for the US Government provides almost all of its profits), benefits enormously not only from the wars, but from the extension of the American empire. A threat by the US Government is a threat on behalf of those owners, and yet the owners who control those international corporations get none of the blame for those wars, which always serve their interests, by extending their empire even when the wars are lost.

How did this ongoing decades-long catastrophe happen?

It didn’t even strengthen the US militarily. Look at the record, and consider not only the phenomenon itself, but its actual results — a ceaseless string of military defeats:

Why did the US lose the war in Vietnam?

Why did the US lose the war in Afghanistan?

Why did the US lose the war in Iraq?

Why did the US lose the war in Libya?

Why did the US lose the war in Syria?

What produces this doubly-bad habit — actually badness squared — of the American Government, during the past fifty years: aggressions that fail?

Could it be because the takeover of America’s Government, by its arms-manufacturers and fuel-extraction firms — and their lobbyists and other agents — has been accompanied by soaring corruption? We’ll deal with that question later here. But first, let’s consider the shocking present condition of America’s military:

On 19 August 2019, the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia — a prime US ally in that part of the world — headlined a lengthy study and report: “AVERTING CRISIS: AMERICAN STRATEGY, MILITARY SPENDING AND COLLECTIVE DEFENCE IN THE INDO-PACIFIC”. Its Executive Summary presented the following key points:

America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific, and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain. …

Over the next decade, the US defence budget is unlikely to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy owing to a combination of political, fiscal and internal pressures. …

America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific — a challenge it is working hard to address. …

A strategy of collective defence is fast becoming necessary as a way of offsetting shortfalls in America’s regional military power and holding the line against rising Chinese strength.

But did China actually cause this “atrophying”? Clearly not.

The problem is internal to America itself. Casting the blame elsewhere is only for idiots to believe, but foreign ‘enemies’ (such as China) are needed in order for the military-industrial complex to thrive. Can you imagine the military-industrial complex growing and thriving if the public believe that domestic corruption is actually behind this consistent and constant record, of US military failures?

Did China cause America’s defeat in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or in Libya, or in Syria?

Let’s be more general about this: Did North Korea cause it? During the four-day period of 24-27 August 2019, an Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 adult US citizens asked them “Do you consider the countries listed below to be a friend or an enemy of the United States?” and listed 13 countries. The ones scoring highest for “Enemy” — the most-commonly selected, as being an “Enemy” — were: North Korea 53%, Iran 46%, Russia 35%, and China 21%. Did any of those nations cause this “atrophying”?

Ever since 2001, Gallup has asked, almost annually, and always in February, “What one country anywhere in the world do you consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy today?” No countries were ever listed for that question; the respondent in these polls always just answered it however that person wanted. In February 2001, 2% said “North Korea.” 6% said “Russia.” 8% said “Iran.” 14% said “China.” And a whopping 38% said “Iraq.” 4% said “Saudi Arabia.” Those were the most-frequently mentioned countries, shortly before 9/11 struck. 0% said “Afghanistan.” How accurately informed were Americans, by ‘our’ ‘news’-media, then? In February 2001, the top “enemy,” overwhelmingly (at 38%), was Iraq — which had never posed any threat, at all, to America. It was no enemy, whatsoever, to Americans. But we invaded and destroyed it in 2003 — after having long been strangulating its population, by means of an economic blockade, “sanctions,” following Saddam Hussein’s having invaded Iraq’s neighboring country, Kuwait, in 1990, and trying to take it from its owner, Kuwait’s royal Al-Sabah family. Americans then strangled Iraqis with sanctions for what their ruler Saddam Hussein had done to the Sabah clan, and then we invaded and destroyed Iraq altogether in 2003, for nothing but our Government’s, and its ‘news’-media’s, war-mongering lies — the ‘news’-media serving as mere stenographers for (instead of as investigators of) the Government’s ceaseless lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, etc.

Gallup’s next poll on this question was 2005, and the top “Enemy”s at that time were 22% each for “North Korea” and for “Iraq,” 14% for “Iran,” 10% for “China,” 3% for “Afghanistan,” and 2% each for “Saudi Arabia,” “Syria,” and “the United States itself.” How accurately informed were Americans, then? (Well: 2% got the answer right — or, maybe, 4% did, if the correct answer was both “the United States itself” and “Saudi Arabia.” That 2% or 4% was the highest percentage ever who got it right.)

By 2012, 10% said “North Korea.” 2% said “Russia.” 32% said “Iran.” 23% said “China.” 5% said “Iraq.” 7% said “Afghanistan.” How accurately informed were Americans, then?

In 2018 (the latest such poll), 51% said “North Korea.” 19% said “Russia.” 7% said “Iran.” 11% said “China.” 2% said “Iraq.” 0% said “Afghanistan. How accurately informed were Americans, then?

Isn’t it remarkable how malleable — changing over time — Americas’ opinions are, of which nations are ‘enemies’? The designation of which ones are ‘enemies’, at any given time, is controlled by the Government and its stenographic press — the ‘news’-media — and by the billionaires’ think tanks (such as Brookings Institution) that provide many of the ‘experts’, which the ‘news’-media cite and interview in order to validate the lies.

None of those countries had ever attacked America (except America’s own Deep State had, if that’s what was being referred to as “the United States itself”). Nonetheless, the US Government has threatened each one of those other countries many times, and has actually invaded some of them, but did even a single one of those countries ever commit aggression against the United States? Not even Afghanistan did, though the US-and-Saud-created Taliban had protected the Saudi aristocrat Osama bin Laden leading up to the 9/11 attacks. However, the Afghan Government afterward never invaded America. Not only was the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 unprovoked aggression, but (though less clearly) the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan also was. And yet, for some reason, Americans don’t view the US Government as a global criminal outlaw. Instead, Americans view the targeted foreign governments as if they were that. This is the consequence of a ceaselessly propagandistic national press, which protects itself and its masters (never revealing the truth about either itself or its masters — the regime’s propaganda that supplants truth), and fools its public to hate and fear those masters’ targeted ‘enemies’ — instead of to loathe those masters and their press (which have actually engendered such malleable mass-hatreds and the resulting unprovoked invasions by the US).

Is it the case that Americans’ fear and hatred of foreign governments varies according to what the owners of America’s major news-media have had their reporters report during the year before, and that the latter is, in turn, unskeptical stenographic reporting from whatever the US Government had just told them during the year before, and that it’s always full of lies, and none of it should be uncritically believed, and the American public are merely fools who are constantly being manipulated by the owners of the military-industrial complex, which actually controls not only the President, but the Congress, in both Parties, as well as their deceiving media? If that’s the case, then the generals and the armaments and extraction firms could be making lots of money, from manipulating the public, in this carefully coordinated way, by the controlling owners, the big stockholders — America’s 607 billionaires. It’s sometimes called “the Deep State.” But it’s not aiming for any actual victory by a military that actually represents the interests of the American people; it is instead merely aiming to generate sales of weapons and spreading of fear, and a continual succession of wars, so as to feed the controlling owners’ bloody greed to sell more weapons, oil, and gas. It’s safe for them to do, because international laws aren’t ever enforced against them, nor even against their top agents (such as America’s President, members of Congress, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and of CNN, and all other agents of the billionaires). They’re all immune, no matter how many times they have deceived their public into supporting the perpetration of international war-crimes, on the basis of lies about their ‘humanitarian’ concern to spread ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.

Is there any alternative explanation for these catastrophic continual results?

The US military is so profoundly corrupt that there are “Trillions of Dollars in US Military Spending Unaccounted For”, and yet the US military remains, by far, the most-trusted and highest-approved, of all institutions in America, respected above the Presidency, above the Congress, above the courts, above the schools, above any, at all, year after year, for decades. And the public accept this even when the US public themselves disapprove of the Government’s wars. So: there is total impunity for the mega-profiteers from all of these international war-crimes that are so routinely perpetrated by the US In fact, there is sound reason to believe that the corruption is so enormous that not only is the military-industrial complex the most corrupt part of the American nation, but this nation itself is actually, according to the most-reliable measures, the world’s most corrupt at its very top, and perhaps even below the very top. Perversely, the military is not only the most respected, but it’s also the most corrupt, of America’s institutions: it is corruption on top of corruption, the peak of corruption. And this is the reason why it’s the only federal department that is — and has always been — unauditable.

This is how the country that actually (though not in the official figures) spends around half of the world’s entire military budget can lose war after war after war and its military still retain the highest respect from its public — the highest of all of the nation’s institutions — regardless of its astounding longstanding record of failure and ongoing global catastrophes, producing benefits virtually only for the nation’s billionaires and their top agents, while mass-murdering millions abroad, for no other real purpose than to keep the profits flowing. Like Barack Obama (the invader of Libya and Syria on the basis of lies) repeatedly bragged, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, meaning that all others are “dispensable.” Those others serve their purpose, as ‘allies’ to buy US-made weapons, or else as ‘enemies’ for those weapons to be used against. Even if the wars are lost, the weapons were sold, and the ‘enemies’ had served as target-practice, to keep the juices flowing, for America’s owners — people like this, and these. Such a nation used to be called an “Empire,” but now it’s called “hegemony”, in the wake of WW II. Perhaps it’s now called “the one indispensable nation,” and “hegemony,” because FDR had been opposed to empires, so they can’t call it an empire. Opposition to empires was FDR’s guiding principle in international relations, and this conviction he held was a major reason behind his plan for the UN to become the basis of an international democracy to emerge — no empires, at all. Today’s America is the reverse of that, more like a posthumous victory of fascism, which is based upon empire: this fascist victory after World War II is the burial of FDR’s plan and dream for the world. His dream has been buried by America’s own fascists.

The German intelligence-analyst who blogs anonymously as “Moon of Alabama,” and whose predictions, which I have closely watched for five years and found to be stunningly accurate, wrote, on September 5th, that, “The US military and its weapons are regularly hyped in ‘western’ media. But it has long been clear to (non-US) experts that US military technology is not superior to that of other countries. In several important fields Russian, Chinese and even Indian build weapons have much better capabilities. The reason is simple. US weapons are not developed or built with a real strategic need in mind. They don’t get developed for achieving the most effect in an existential war against a capable enemy, but to create profit.”

Given that America spends around half of the entire world’s military budget, and yet gets very bad military results, there can be no reasonable doubt that the reason is massive corruption. One prominent example is James Comey, who served President Clinton 1996-2001, President Bush 2002-2005, and President Obama 2013-2017; and he was Lockheed Martin’s second-or third-highest-paid executive, and then the chief lawyer for Lockheed Martin’s second-biggest owner, during the interim period 2005-2013, between Presidents Bush and Obama.

As I wrote in March of this year:

The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the US Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of US-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.

Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.

On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that

“After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in US military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.”

Lockheed Martin is by far the largest US ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all US Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.

That’s where the big money is being made: not in Government-service, but in the private-sector side of the revolving door between Government-service and the private sector. Phrased in a different way, and using a different metaphor: Government-service is the career’s entré, but the private sector is its dessert, in America’s corrupt system. Outright bribes aren’t necessary, in this system — the aristocratic system — where what matters is not what you know, but whom you know; not what skills you have, but whom your friends are. It doesn’t produce efficiency, but it does produce supercharged wealth at the very top, amongst the richest and most powerful few.

And it produces gargantuan and longstanding military failure.

On August 29th, the US Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General issued its “Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda”, which identified US criminal statutes that Comey had personally violated in order to precipitate the Obama Administration’s Russiagate investigations against then-candidate Donald Trump. It noted that “Comey’s closest advisors used the words ‘surprised,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘shocked,’ and [expressed] ‘disappointment’ to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.” And it stated, not just once but a number of times, the terse phrase that “After reviewing the matter, the [Justice] Department [now under Trump] declined prosecution.” Ironically, some of the very same criminal statutes that they said Comey had violated had been the same ones on which Comey had earlier refused to recommend prosecution of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — that the documents were his (her) personal property, and not the property of his (her) employer, the US Government. The I.G.’s report stated unequivocally, in his own case, “We conclude that the Memos were official FBI records, rather than Comey’s personal documents.” Perhaps Comey had felt free to do this because he had earlier refused to recommend prosecution of her for having done it. Perhaps he felt that his actions, as FBI Director, had, in her case, established a legal precedent, which superseded the congressionally passed and Presidentially signed-into-law criminal statutes that he was actually oath-bound to enforce and possessed no legal authority to either override or ignore. Perhaps that’s why he did it — perhaps he had persuaded himself that he wasn’t a criminal who was at the top. Perhaps he had deceived himself about that.

At the top, in the United States, corruption is not only massive; it is entirely bipartisan. There’s no way around it.

On 10 September 2019, the independent investigative journalist Sarah Carter headlined “Flynn Hearing Reveals Existence of Bombshell DOJ Memo Exonerating Michael Flynn”, and revealed evidence that Michael Flynn’s guilty plea in the Russiagate-Trump case had been based on Comey’s having hidden from Flynn exculpatory evidence, and that therefore the plea-agreement might be ruled invalid. Furthermore: “the existence of a Justice Department memo from Jan. 30, 2017 exonerating Flynn of any collusion with Russia,” and the document continues to be hidden from the public, but might soon be released. Yet the resulting war-mongering lies have shaped the public’s attitudes, and those attitudes could last for years and continue to shape American politics even long after the fraud has been exposed.

And that’s just one person’s case, Comey. The entire military-industrial complex operates this way, and long has been doing so, very successfully for America’s billionaires and their foreign allies, such as for the Sauds, and for the billionaires who control Israel. (Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, and virtually all of that aid from US taxpayers pays for Israel’s purchases of weapons from Lockheed Martin and other US weapons-firms.)

That’s the “swamp,” and Trump is part of it, like all recent US Presidents have been. There is no accountability, at the top. And this is why America’s military capabilities are failing.

Eric ZUESSE

American writer and investigative historian

In Wars and Weapons We Trust

America’s Militarized Profession of Faith

William J. ASTORE

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church) and to the soaring warbirds of the U.S. military, which I believed kept us safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American technological superiority over the godless Communists. 

With all its scandals, especially when it came to priestly sexual abuse, I lost my faith in the Catholic Church. Indeed, I would later learn that there had been a predatory priest in my own parish when I was young, a grim man who made me uneasy at the time, though back then I couldn’t have told you why. As for those warbirds, like so many Americans, I thrilled to their roar at air shows, but never gave any real thought to the bombs they were dropping in Vietnam and elsewhere, to the livesthey were ending, to the destruction they were causing. Nor, at that age, did I ever consider their enormous cost in dollars or just how much Americans collectively sacrificed to have “top cover,” whether of the warplane or godly kind.

There were good and devoted priests in my Catholic diocese. There were good and devoted public servants in the U.S. military. Admittedly, I never seriously considered the priesthood, but I did sign up for the Air Force, surprising myself by serving in it for 20 years. Still, both institutions were then, and remain, deeply flawed. Both seek, in a phrase the Air Force has long used, “global reach, global power.” Both remain hierarchies that regularly promote true believers to positions of authority. Both demand ultimate obedience. Both sweep their sins under the rug. Neither can pass an audit. Both are characterized by secrecy. Both seem remarkably immune to serious efforts at reform. And both, above all, know how to preserve their own power, even as they posture and proselytize about serving a higher one.

However, let me not focus here on the one “holy catholic and apostolic church,” words taken from the “profession of faith” I recited during Mass each week in my youth. I’d prefer to focus instead on that other American holy church, the U.S. military, with all its wars and weapons, its worshipers and wingmen, together with its vision of global dominance that just happens to include end-of-world scenarios as apocalyptic as those of any imaginable church of true believers. I’m referring, of course, to our country’s staggeringly large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, just now being updated — the term seems to be “modernized” — to the tune of something like $1.7 trillion over the decades to come.

A Profession of Twenty-First-Century All-American Faith

“Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value” is a telling phrase linked to Joe Biden. And in those same terms, there’s no question what the American government values most: its military, to the tune of almost $1.5 trillionover the next two years (although the real number may well exceed $2 trillion). Republicans and Democrats agree on little these days, except support for spending on that military, its weaponry, its wars to come, and related national security state outlays.

In that context, I’ve been wondering what kind of “profession of faith” we might have to recite, if there were the equivalent of Mass for what has increasingly become our military church. What would it look like? Whom and what would we say we believed in? As a lapsed Catholic with a lot of practice in my youth professing my faith in the Church, as well as a retired military officer and historian, I have a few ideas about what such a “profession” might look like:

* We believe in wars. We may no longer believe in formal declarations of war (not since December 1941 has Congress made one in our name), but that sure hasn’t stopped us from waging them. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the Cold War to the War on Terror, and so many military interventions in between, including Grenada, Panama, and Somalia, Americans are always fighting somewhere as if we saw great utility in thumbing our noses at the Prince of Peace. (That’s Jesus Christ, if I remember my Catholic catechism correctly.)

* We believe in weaponry, the more expensive the better. The underperformingF-35 stealth fighter may cost $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. An updated nuclear triad (land-based missiles, nuclear submarines, and strategic bombers) may cost that already mentioned $1.7 trillion. New (and malfunctioning) aircraft carriers cost us more than $10 billion each. And all such weaponry requests get funded, with few questions asked, despite a history of their redundancy, ridiculously high price, regular cost overruns, and mediocre performance. Meanwhile, Americans squabble bitterly over a few hundred million dollars for the arts and humanities.

* We believe in weapons of mass destruction. We believe in them so strongly that we’re jealous of anyone nibbling at our near monopoly. As a result, we work overtime to ensure that infidels and atheists (that is, the Iranians and North Koreans, among others) don’t get them. In historical terms, no country has devoted more research or money to deadly nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry than the United States. In that sense, we’ve truly put our money where our mouths are (and where a devastating future might be).

* We believe with missionary zeal in our military and seek to establish our “faith” everywhere. Hence, our global network of perhaps 800 overseas military bases. We don’t hesitate to deploy our elite missionaries, our equivalent to the Jesuits, the Special Operations forces to more than 130 countries annually. Similarly, the foundation for what we like to call foreign assistance is often military training and foreign military sales. Our present supreme leader, Pope Trump I, boasts of military sales across the globe, most notably to the infidel Saudis. Even when Congress makes what, until recently, was the rarest of attempts to rein in this deadly trade in arms, Pope Trump vetoes it. His rationale: weapons and profits should rule all.

* We believe in our college of cardinals, otherwise known as America’s generals and admirals. We sometimes appoint them (or anoint them?) to the highest positions in the land. While Trump’s generals — Michael Flynn, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly — have fallen from grace at the White House, America’s generals and admirals continue to rule globally. They inhabit proconsul-like positions in sweeping geographical commands that (at least theoretically) cover the planet and similarly lead commands aimed at dominating the digital-computer realm and special operations. One of them will head a new force meant to dominate space through time eternal. A “strategic” command (the successor to the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, so memorably satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) continues to ensure that, at some future moment, the U.S. will be able to commit mass genocide by quite literally destroying the world with nuclear weapons. Indeed, Pope Trump recently boasted that he could end America’s Afghan War in a week, apparently through the mass nuclear genocide of (his figure) 10 million Afghans. Even as he then blandly dismissed the idea of wiping that country “off the face of the earth,” he openly reflected the more private megalomania of those military professionals funded by the rest of us to think about “the unthinkable.” In sum, everything is — theoretically at least — under the thumbs of our unelected college of cardinals. Their overblown term for it is “full-spectrum dominance,” which, in translation, means they grant themselves god-like powers over our lives and that of our planet (though the largely undefeated enemies in their various wars don’t seem to have acknowledged this reality).

* We believe that freedom comes through obedience. Those who break ranks from our militarized church and protest, like Chelsea Manning, are treated as heretics and literally tortured.

* We believe military spending brings wealth and jobs galore, even when it measurably doesn’t. Military production is both increasingly automated and increasingly outsourced, leading to far fewer good-paying American jobs compared to spending on education, infrastructure repairs of and improvements in roads, bridges, levees, and the like, or just about anything else for that matter.

* We believe, and our most senior leaders profess to believe, that our military represents the very best of us, that we have the “finest” one in human history.

* We believe in planning for a future marked by endless wars, whether against terrorism or “godless” states like China and Russia, which means our military church must be forever strengthened in the cause of winning ultimate victory.

* Finally, we believe our religion is the one true faith. (Just as I used to be taught that the Catholic Church was the one true church and that salvation outside it was unattainable.) More pacific “religions” are dismissed as weak, misguided, and exploitative. Consider, for example, the denunciation of NATO countries that refuse to spend more money on their militaries. Such a path to the future is heretical; therefore, they must be punished.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Keep in mind that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God, or so I was taught as a boy anyway. One might say that the beginning of U.S. militarism is simply fear, whether of terrorists, immigrants, Muslims, Communists, or other enemies of the moment. If Americans continue to be wracked with such fears, they’ll undoubtedly continue to profess their faith in the military as our country’s noblest protectors, too.

Where does such a profession of faith in wars and weapons end? Is there even a terminus of any sort other than destruction?

Those of us who endured war games and hair-trigger nuclear alerts during the Cold War have long had apocalyptic fears of such endings in the back of our minds. Under Donald Trump, they’ve come back with a vengeance. Unlike many Christians, I don’t envision Christ returning to pick up the irradiated Elect after a nuclear version of Armageddon. But that, of course, is a true worst-case scenario. A more likely ending is a slow-motion collapse of America’s imperial empire and the church of the military that goes with it, the resulting chaos possibly leading to a Second Coming, not of Christ but of medieval levels of meanness and misery.

Or, maybe, just maybe, we might start anew by questioning our militarized profession of faith. We might begin to realize that our warrior-church isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We might begin to seek meaning and salvation not through wars and weaponry, not through generals and their admirers, not through impossible dreams of total dominance, but through compassion and a desire for global justice.

I confess that I long ago turned my back on the Catholic Church of my youth, but I haven’t turned my back on Christianity and the wisdom it can offer. For what does it profit a country if it gains the whole world yet loses its soul? (In our case, of course, it might be more appropriate to say: For what does it profit a country if it gains nothing from its wars and military mindset yet loses its soul?) The more we Americans profess our faith in warriors, weapons, and wars, the more we endanger our nation’s collective soul. There’s a reason, after all, that Jesus placed the peacemakers, not the warriors, among the children of God.

tomdispatch.com

Time for Expulsion of US Soldiers from Iraq

By: Kayhan Int’l 

The situation in Iraq, especially in areas where the US has an unwarranted military presence, is becoming volatile and could lead to a dangerous and bloody confrontation.
This is evident by the intrusion of a patrol of the American armed forces north of Mosul near the Iraq-Syria border, where the timely action taken by Hashd ash-Sha’bi or the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) to stop the intruders and force them to retreat has saved life of a number of Iraqi security personnel and civilians from becoming easy targets of the Daesh terrorists.

The US forces had planned to provide Daesh terrorists with vital information on Iraqi security measures as well as on ordinary citizens in the border towns and villages so that they could be easily killed, injured, abducted or enslaved.

This is not the first time that PMU has stopped US military patrols in the area, following last month’s similar attempts by the Americans, whose presence on Iraqi soil is being hotly debated in Iraqi political circles.

The PMU is determined to nip in the bud any sectarian, separatist, or secessionist moves by the US, and actively supports the passing of a law by the parliament to kick out the unwanted Americans and save the sovereignty of the country.

MPs are drafting a law that would set a deadline for a US withdrawal, according to Mahmud al-Rubaie of the Sadiqoun bloc, one of the political groups working on the text.
He categorically rejected the presence of foreign troops in Iraq, and said it is high time the Americans were told by the government to end their military presence. 

PMU Deputy Commander Redhwan al-Anzi, confirming reports of the encounter of his forces with an American patrol that was visibly scared and called its base for air cover, denounced the American intrusion as "deliberate provocation” and warned of decisive response in future. 

In view of these facts, especially the evil nature of the Americans, the Iraq government, its parliament in particular, should speed up the necessary measures for passing a law for the formal ending of all American military presence.

It is an open secret that Washington not just continues to support Daesh, but as an avowed enemy of the Iraqi Muslim people, is scheming to undermine, if not overthrow, the elected government. 

Thus any lax attitude by the political factions or any delay by the government in telling the Americans to leave might result in armed clashes and unnecessary loss of life.
Iraqi life is too precious to be the constant target of the American provocateurs who unfortunately do not understand words of advice, and seem oblivious of the approaching fatalities in their own ranks, complete with body bags for return of their dead soldiers to the aggrieved families.