The Afghanistan Papers Confirm America's Longest War Is a Lie

The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, detailing a true history of the nation’s longest official war, reveals nothing new about the war’s futility or about the fact that it was doomed to failure from almost the beginning. The Post fought a legal battle for three years to obtain the documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog agency that interviewed hundreds of officials about their honest assessments of the war.

What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply destructive at worst.

More than 10 years ago I wrote, together with James Ingalls, a critical assessment of the Afghanistan war. The title of our book was Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Those last three words, “the Propaganda of Silence,” are a direct reference to poor media coverage and the irresponsible manner in which the press took an uncritical view of the war. The evidence was there for all to see that the U.S. war was doomed to failure once you scratched beneath the surface of officials’ rosy rhetoric.

The most important function of the Afghanistan Papers is to confirm that government officials have been utterly dishonest with the public about U.S. achievements and progress in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General at SIGAR, admitted to the Post that the documents prove that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The picture that emerges of how insiders have viewed the war is startlingly similar to how critics have portrayed it over the years. Earlier this year I wrote a “Brief History” of the Afghanistan war for Truthdig in which I assessed the early years of the conflict:

The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

In comparison, one economist told SIGAR, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, that he:

… blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

In my history of the war, I also wrote: “Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick.” But, I continued, “The Taliban appears to have had a ‘wait it out’ strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power.”

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that “Obama’s strategy was also destined to fail,” as it relied on “a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” In the end, I concluded: “Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.”

In 2015 I wrote in another piece for Truthdig titled “We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again,” that:

Despite spending billions of dollars—the U.S. offered its largest share of foreign aid to Afghans last year—there is little to show for it. Nearly $10 billion was spent on arming and training Afghan forces. But as the dismal state of the Afghan National Army shows, that money may as well have been poured down the drain.

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers reveal that officials privately knew they were fueling corruption, and that “Much of the money … ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.”

The U.S. has also been lining the pockets of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, who have a long and bloody history going back to the era of Soviet occupation, when the CIA doled out cash to fight its Cold War enemy. In my 2006 book, my co-author and I warned against this practice, devoting a whole chapter to it, titled “Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another.” We suggested that instead of rewarding them with cash and government positions, the U.S. ought to disarm the warlords and help Afghans bring them to justice. The U.S. did the opposite, and the result was entirely predictable.

The Afghanistan Papers confirm that:

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years.

One senior government official told SIGAR, “We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.” American tax dollars have lined the pockets of mass killers to an unimaginable extent. In my 2015 article, I referred specifically to Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was elevated to the position of vice president even though he had been “implicated in numerous atrocities and mass killings.” Among the few new revelations from The Washington Post’s investigative report is the assertion that “the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month ‘to not cause trouble.’ ”

Now the Trump administration is hoping to resume peace negotiations with the Taliban with a plan to reinstall the very regime the U.S. claimed was harboring terrorists and harming Afghans. If the point of the war was to go from point A to point B and then back to point A, with an unimaginably high death toll in between, then by that measure alone the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been a success.

What American officials and the mainstream media has consistently failed to do in Afghanistan is actually pay attention to what ordinary Afghans say and want. The biggest toll of the failed American war has been the death and destruction of lives in a country that was already torn apart by years of war in 2001. We may never get a full accounting of how many Afghans have died or been maimed for life as a direct result of a war that insiders knew was a mistake.

But what we do know is all armed forces in Afghanistan are implicated in war crimes. In 2018, in a little-covered story, Afghans submitted a whopping 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court that “include accounts of alleged atrocities, not only by groups like the Taliban and the ISIS, but also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies.”

The Post’s investigative series is a welcome addition to mountains of evidence that the Afghanistan war is a failure. But it was clear to those of us who had been paying attention that U.S. officials were lying about the war for nearly two decades. The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?

Sonali Kolhatkar

Columnist

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV,…

US Democrats Cultivated the Barbarism of Isis

by Jonathan Cook 

There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”.

Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to do – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.

Islamic State, or Isis, didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.

No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t care.

Overthrow, not regime change

You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.

The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since 9/11.

The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.

The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.

The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.

Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”

The birth of Islamic State

The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.

One can argue about the initial causes of the uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in 2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the Assad government’s authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?

Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.

The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.

The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.

A dark US vanity project

As Rove and Cheney played around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.

The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.

This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.

Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.

The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.

From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.

A giant red herring

Trump is now ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is closing a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.

What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place? They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East” is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.

First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.

Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.

With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. Its state-building rationale is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. It will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.

Doomed Great Game

The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With the US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time risks sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.

The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to foil Turkish ambition. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.

That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.

Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?

Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.

Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.

Trump enjoyed destroying nuclear deal as Obama’s major foreign policy success: professor

TEHRAN - Roy Licklider, an adjunct senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies and adjunct professor of political science, says Donald Trump was happy to kill the 2015 nuclear deal which was President Barack Obama’s major foreign policy success.

“Trump enjoyed destroying President Obama’s major foreign policy success,” Licklider told ILNA in an interview published on October 6.

Licklider said like other academics he was a strong supporter of the nuclear pact, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“I strongly approved of the Joint Agreement, like most academics I know, and I saw it as President Obama’s major foreign policy achievement,” Licklider remarked.

‘Trump enjoys overriding experts’
 
The professor said Trump did not heed warnings by politicians and academics to avoid abandoning the JCPOA.

“The fact that many observers thought this was a mistake did not deter him; he enjoys overriding ‘experts’.”

He also applauded efforts by the Europeans and Iran to keep the deal alive, “but I doubt that they will succeed”.

According to the Associated Press, the Spaniard set to become the European Union's point-man in Iran says the nuclear deal with Tehran must be preserved.
During a parliamentary confirmation hearing to become the next EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell said Monday that "we have to keep this agreement alive in order to defend our interests, our security and avoid something worse."
Borrell, who is currently foreign minister in Spain's caretaker government and set to take over in Brussels from Federica Mogherini on Nov. 1, says "the political unity of the Europeans will be crucial" in keeping the agreement going.

‘Trump notoriously willing to change positions but not on JCPOA’

The academic also said Trump is infamous for changing position on issues but not the multilateral nuclear agreement.

“President Trump is notoriously willing to change positions on issues, but it seems unlikely that he will do so with this one.”

On his prediction of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Trump era, Licklider said, “If Trump’s successor returns to a more traditional foreign policy, I suspect most allied governments will be relieved and encourage the change.”

He also said it is unlikely that sanctions pressure will force Iran to change policy, noting that massive academic literature over the past several decades concludes that sanctions don’t change important policies.

Iran has said that it is adopting “maximum resistance” in the face of Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure”.

Professor Licklider said the United States exerts economic pressure on people with the hope of inciting them to rebel against the ruling system.

“They are supposed to work by making a population so miserable that it will pressure its government to change policy, but target governments can usually deflect this process by appealing to nationalism and blaming the sanctioning state.”

On the unrest and conflicts in certain Middle Eastern states, he said, “There are many different violent conflicts in the region, each with its own distinctive issues.  Many of these are due to weak economies, bad governance, and outside involvement, all of which can be fixed in principle.”

AMERICA’S MILITARY ADVENTURISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . .

. . . and the Scapegoating of Iran!

by Selvam Canagaratna

"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power on unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling."

– François Mauriac, Second Thoughts, 1961.

Seventeen years of war in the Middle East, noted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, before posing the inevitable question: "and what does the United States have to show for it?"

Someone has to be blamed for debacles that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, including at least 200,000 civilians, and millions driven from their homes, he wrote. ‟Someone has also to be blamed for the proliferation of radical jihadist groups throughout the Middle East, the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, the wholesale destruction of cities and towns under relentless airstrikes and the abject failure of US and US-backed forces to stanch the insurgencies."

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘scapegoat’ as ‟a person bearing the blame for the sins, shortcomings, etc. of others, esp. as an expedient."

But you can be sure it won’t be the generals, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the rabid neocons such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton who sold us the wars, the Central Intelligence Agency, the arms contractors who profit from perpetual war or the celebrity pundits on the airwaves and in newspapers who serve as cheerleaders for the mayhem.

Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, although Iran was in compliance with the agreement, was the first salvo in this effort to divert attention from these failures to Iran. Bolton, the new National Security Adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advocate the overthrow of the Iranian government, with Giuliani saying last month that Trump is "as committed to regime change as we [an inner circle of presidential advisers] are."

"The Iran nuclear deal was possible following several letters by President Barack Obama assuring the Iranian leadership that America had no intention of violating Iranian sovereignty," the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, Gholamali Khoshroo, told me. "America said it wanted to engage in a serious dialogue on equal footing and mutual interests and concerns. These assurances led to the negotiations that concluded with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."

Donald Trump, however, even as a candidate, called the agreement with Iran ‘the worst deal America ever made’, Ambassador Khoshroo reminded the world. "He called this deal a source of embarrassment for America. Indeed, it was not the deal but America’s unilateral decision to walk away from an agreement that was supported by the United Nations Security Council, and in fact co-sponsored and drafted by the United States that is the source of embarrassment for America. To walk away from an international agreement and then threaten a sovereign country is the real source of embarrassment since Iran was in full compliance while the US never was."

Iran announced recently that it has tentative plans to produce the feedstock for centrifuges – the machines that enrich uranium – if the nuclear deal is not salvaged by European members of the JCPOA. European countries, dismayed by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, are attempting to renegotiate the deal, which imposes restrictions on Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

"Why go to war with a country that abides by an agreement it has signed with the United States?" asked Chris Hedges. "Why attack a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State, that now threaten us after we created and armed them? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?"

The architects of these wars are in trouble, explained Hedges. "They have watched helplessly as the instability and political vacuum they caused, especially in Iraq, left Iran as the dominant power in the region. Washington, in essence, elevated its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake, beyond attacking Iran. Those both in the US and abroad who began or promoted these wars see a conflict with Iran as a solution to their foreign and increasingly domestic dilemmas."

Hedges noted that it was Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, facing internal unrest, who launched the war in Yemen as a vanity project to bolster his credentials as a military leader. Now he desperately needs to deflect attention from the quagmire and humanitarian disaster he has created.

And then there is President Trump, desperate for a global crusade he can use to mask his ineptitude, the rampant corruption of his administration and his status as an international pariah when he runs for re-election in 2020.

"Of course, blaming and threatening Iran is not new," Ambassador Khoshroo said. "This has been going on for 40 years. The Iranian people and the Iranian government are accustomed to this nonsense. United States intervention in the internal affairs of Iran goes back a long time, including the [Iranian] war with Iraq, when the United States supported Saddam Hussein. Then America invaded Iraq in 2003 in their so-called ‘intervention for democracy and elimination of WMDs.’ Iran has always resisted and will always resist US threats."

"America was in Iran 40 years ago," the Ambassador recalled. "About 100,000 US advisers were in Iran during the rule of the Shah, who was among the closest allies of America. America was unable to keep this regime in power because the Iranian people revolted against such dependency and suppression. Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, for 40 years, America continued to violate international law, especially the Algeria agreements it signed with Iran in 1981."

The Algeria Declaration was a set of agreements between the United States and Iran that resolved the Iranian hostage crisis. It was brokered by the Algerian government.

The warmongers have no more of a plan for "regime change" in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the idea – pushed by lunatic-fringe figures like Bolton and Giuliani – that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

In all these equations the 80 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. Perhaps, they would not welcome a war with the United States. Perhaps if attacked they would resist. Perhaps, they don’t want to be occupied. Perhaps a war with Iran would be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, are unable to fathom.

The issue of Palestine is at the heart of turmoil in the Middle East for Muslims. Americans say they want the Middle East to be free from violent extremism, but this will only happen when the Middle East is free from occupation and foreign intervention.

The Americans are selling their weapons throughout the Middle East. They calculate how much money they can earn from destruction. They don’t care about human beings. They don’t care about security or democratic process or political process. This is worrisome."

"What are the results of American policies in the Middle East?" asked Hedges. "All of the American allies in the region are in turmoil. Only Iran is secure and stable. Why is this so?"

Courtesy- The Sunday Island

Genocide from Kissinger to Trump

by RON JACOBS

Donald Trump’s statement earlier this week that he could win the US war in Afghanistan but he doesn’t want to kill ten million Afghans was both revealing and appalling. Like so many other of Trump’s statements, his remark revealed the genocidal nature of US foreign policy. It is a policy that considers human lives as part of some greater equation that results in the supreme dominance of the US economic and military system. When Henry Kissinger was working for Richard Nixon, it was called realpolitik. In that instance, it meant the deaths of more than a million Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and US citizens. Jimmy Carter and Zbignew Brzezinski shared Ronald Reagan’s view that the struggle against the Soviet Union rationalized the killing. George Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton saw it as a battle against a terrorist phenomenon. Baby George Bush and Barack Obama organized their mass murder as part of a global war on terror—the GWOT. The terror they were fighting was caused by the very foreign policy the GWOT is part of. Trump may not want to kill ten million Afghans, but he seems to be okay with killing them in smaller numbers like Obama was.

The statement by Trump is appalling only in that most US residents pretend that their lifestyles are not dependent on the murder of other people who live in other countries. It becomes even more appalling when one realizes that most of those same US residents will eventually accept (if hey haven’t already) this price in blood. Many even revel in it. That’s where we are at this moment in history.

Trump’s statement took me back to a different time. I was a ten-year-old boy living on a small military installation in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar is a major city in the area of Pakistan and Afghanistan where the Pashtun people live. It is the Pashtun who form the largest part of the opposition to the current US occupation in Afghanistan. They are an ancient people who refuse to be subjugated. Anyway, my father had a job that involved gathering data from a radar system eavesdropping on China and the Soviet Union. He rarely talked about his work. It was all classified and I had yet to become curious about what his role in the imperial military was. So, I never asked him any questions about his work. We talked about baseball, household chores, school and life in general.

He had a coworker who lived off base. In fact, he lived in a hotel in downtown Peshawar that had been built during the recently ended British colonial period. Low fans hung from the ceiling, horse or mule-drawn tonga carts lined up like taxis in front of the hotel, servers brought us pine nuts and mango drinks while this man I’ll call Mr. S. and I waited for a driver who took us on different excursions. Many of those trips were to villages in the region. Upon arriving at a particular village, Mr. S. would introduce me to a couple of the boys who always greeted us. I would go off to play soccer, tag or some other game with the boys. I could speak a form of pidgin’ Pashtu. Still, we communicated mostly via gestures and some universal understanding. Mr. S. would head to one of the one-story adobe buildings with a group of men from the village. Sometimes, officers of the Pakistani military accompanied them. When I asked Mr. S. what they talked about, he said something about politics and agreements. I’m certain now that he was up to some kind of subterfuge I now oppose, but those were more innocent days. At the end of the day, we usually feasted on grilled chicken, grilled goat, fruits, tea and delicious cakes. There were no forks or spoons. However, we used hunting knives to cut the meat from the bone. After eating, we would wash our hands and faces with water drawn from the well. There were no women or girls present at these meals. I do recall talking to some girls in their own compound; we laughed and giggled through a hole in the wall. Then, the girls were called away and we scattered before we got into trouble. I wonder what happened to all those kids. I wonder how many of them were killed by bombing raids and drones as part of the ongoing US intervention. I wonder if Donald Trump, Barack Obama, the Bush presidents, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter even considered the humanity of those they let their henchmen kill. I wonder how many US residents do.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem.  He lives in Vermont.

The Obama Wars

By David Swanson

President Barack Obama waves at the conclusion of his remarks to
U.S. troops at Bagram Airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan, Sunday,
May 25, 2014. (Pete Souza/White House)

Obama’s legacy of warmaking has largely been maintained, advanced, and imitated by bipartisan consensus and by Donald Trump.

By “the Obama wars” I don’t mean some overgrown infants on television screaming racist insults or pretending that opposing racism requires cheering for Obama.

I mean: the widespread indiscriminate murder of human beings with missiles — many of them from robot airplanes — let loose to threaten any non-white country on earth by Obama and expanded by Trump. I mean the catastrophic destruction of Libya — still continued by Trump. I mean the war on Afghanistan, the vast bulk of which was overseen by Obama, though Bush and Trump have had minor roles. I mean the assault on Yemen, begun by Obama and escalated by Trump. I mean the war on Iraq and Syria escalated first by Obama and then by Trump (following the de-escalation locked in place by Bush though Obama fought it tooth-and-nail).

I mean the conflict with Iran, heightened by Obama and then dramatically again by Trump. I mean the expansion of conflict-producing troops and bases across Africa and Asia. I mean the creation of the new cold war with Russia. I mean the buildup in nuclear weapons and the delusional rhetoric about “usable” nuclear weapons. I mean the support for Israel’s wars on Palestinians. I mean the coups in Ukraine and Honduras. I mean the threats to Venezuela. I mean the normalization of fantastical excuses for the gravest crimes. I mean the practice of campaigning on ending wars, never ending any of them, and never having anyone really care. I mean the constant shattering of past records in military spending.

Obama’s legacy, despite all sorts of variations, many of them superficial, and despite its role in defeating Hillary Clinton at the ballot box, has largely been maintained, advanced, and imitated by bipartisan consensus and by Donald Trump.

If you want to review what Obama did in that quirky little area of his job to which some 60% of federal discretionary spending is devoted, and which puts us all at risk of nuclear disaster, pick up a copy of Jeremy Kuzmarov’s book Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State. Kuzmarov places Obama in historical context and outlines his parallels with Woodrow Wilson, another extreme militarist generally understood as a peace visionary. Kuzmarov reviews — and adds information that many of us probably never knew to — the story of Obama’s rise to power and the story of all of his many wars.

We tend to forget that right up through the presidency of George W. Bush wars were thought of as temporary things that had endings. Now they’re hardly thought of at all, but they’re understood to be permanent. And they’re thought of in partisan terms. We sometimes forget that candidate Obama, like candidate Trump, promised a larger military. Candidate Obama promised a larger war on Afghanistan. And when it came time for Obama’s re-election to a second term, he reached out to the New York Times and asked that paper to write an article about how good he was at killing people, about how he carefully studied a list of men, women, and children and picked out the ones in whose name he would send missiles into clusters of unidentified victims. Obama’s claim, in his own words, was “I’m really good at killing people.” Nobody who liked Obama and didn’t like murder allowed themselves to become aware of this aspect of Obama’s re-election campaign; and they never will become aware of it.

The reason it matters is that over 20 Democrats are now campaigning for president, some of whom are promoting the same sort of militarism, some of whom are opposing it to some degree, and some of whom have revealed little or nothing about their positions on such matters. One of them, Joe Biden, was part of Obama’s wars. Biden is the guy who claimed of the mass-slaughter of people in Libya “We didn’t lose a single life.” Kamala Harris is the woman who will never ever question whether by “life” he meant “non-African life.” She’s too busy worrying that peace might break out in Korea. The stupidity of tokenism will plague us until we at least have the decency to regret having fallen for it before. The stupidity of militarism will plague us until we stop glorifying and excusing it and start supporting efforts to create peace.

David Swanson

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio and is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

Trump Murdered the Iran Deal—And Europe Isn’t Too Happy About It

The U.S. behavior regarding such international agreements, Macron said, was "insane."

by

Vijay Prashad

When Donald Trump campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 2016, he would frequently attack the JCPOA as Obama’s folly. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Europe did not want Trump and the United States to walk out of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

JCPOA was the deal negotiated with great effort by Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the U.S.) and signed in 2015. At the time, Europe had substantially lost access to three of its main sources of energy—Russia, Libya, and Iran. Desperation for Iranian oil drove the European pressure on the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to come on board the JCPOA. The U.S. was forced, kicking and screaming, into the agreement.

Iran signed the deal even though Iran’s government disagreed with its premise. The deal implied that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, which it did not have, and that the agreement would constrain it from building a nuclear weapons arsenal, which it has pledged never to have. Threats of war by the United States and its regional partners (namely, Saudi Arabia and Israel) and terrible sanctions had raised the threat level in West Asia. It was to prevent war and to undo the sanctions that Iran came to the table.

As the ink on the deal dried, Europe began to make purchases of Iranian oil. Before the European Union joined the U.S. in its sanctions regime in 2012, the EU countries bought a third of Iran’s oil output. After the deal, Iran’s oil ministry hastened to increase shipments to Europe—although lack of storage facilities and problems with payments hindered the swift increase in oil sales. During 2017, Iran shipped 720,000 barrels per day to Europe. European oil firms (France’s Total, Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum, the Netherlands’ Royal Dutch Shell, Italy’s Eni and Saras, as well as Spain’s Repsol) rushed to re-enter the Iranian oil and natural gas market.

Trump Blames Obama

When Donald Trump campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 2016, he would frequently attack the JCPOA as Obama’s folly. It was the “dumbest” deal, he said in Virginia in September 2016, pointing his finger at Obama and at Hillary Clinton for having signed it. The deal, he said, represents the “highest level of incompetence.”

Trump thought that it was the Obama administration that had initiated the deal, and that U.S. withdrawal from it would once more isolate Iran. But this was a misreading of the 2015 JCPOA, which was pushed not only by Europe but also by Russia and China. U.S. withdrawal from the deal would not be welcomed in Europe or in Asia. This is what Trump did not understand.

Even the closest U.S. ally in Europe—the United Kingdom—had grave reservations about Trump’s policy. UK Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Kim Darroch wrote to the UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson in 2018 about Trump’s policy regarding Iran. Trump wanted to leave the deal, Darroch wrote in a secret memorandum that has now been leaked, to “spite Obama.” The killing of the Iran deal, Darroch wrote in a secret memorandum, was an act of “diplomatic vandalism.”

France and Germany, key signatories of the deal, openly said that the JCPOA was fundamental for regional stability. What they meant was that their oil companies and their oil-dependent civilization required Iranian oil. It was, for them, a practical matter. French President Emmanuel Macron spent three days in Washington, D.C., in April 2018 trying to hammer out the architecture for a new deal—but this failed. The U.S. behavior regarding such international agreements, Macron said, was “insane.”

The Way Ahead

France, Germany, and the UK—the so-called E3—met on July 14 to discuss the fate of the nuclear deal. This date is significant. The JCPOA was signed on July 14, 2015. Now, four years later, these three countries had a discussion and released a joint statement. In the statement, the E3 said that the JCPOA should not be allowed to collapse. “The risks are such that it is necessary for all stakeholders to pause, and consider the possible consequences of their actions,” the E3 said.

They meant the United States of America. It was asked to pause. It stands isolated.

For the past year, these three European countries have worked to develop an alternative payment mechanism that would protect European firms from U.S. sanctions on Iran. This mechanism is known as the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, or INSTEX. The mechanism is designed to allow Iran to export oil in exchange for food, medicine, medical devices, and other necessary goods. There is a shadow here of the UN’s Oil-for-Food Program that was developed in the 1990s to allow Iraq to export its oil.

Josep Borrell, the likely next foreign policy chief of the European Union, said this week, “We will do what we can to guarantee that there is no economic embargo against Iran and that European companies can continue working there.” He said that Spain would likely join France, Germany, and the UK in the INSTEX system. “It is very difficult” to develop INSTEX, he cautioned, “because U.S. laws apply in an extraterritorial manner, in a way that we don’t recognize.”

Abbas Mousavi, a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said that his country hoped that Europe would take “practical, effective, and responsible steps” to implement the JCPOA.

Iranian Diplomacy

While the E3 countries met to discuss Europe’s reaction to the U.S. withdrawal on July 14, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani addressed a session in North Khorasan province. In these remarks, Rouhani said that Iran is “always ready for negotiation.” Iran, he said, urges the U.S. to “abandon bullying.”

Rouhani’s foreign minister—Javad Zarif—arrived at the United Nations in New York to urge once more the implementation of the JCPOA. Zarif will then go to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia to shore up a new bloc of 25 countries opposed to U.S. unilateral sanctions.

An Iranian diplomat jokingly wondered if the E3—France, Germany, and the UK—would join this bloc of 25 states.

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. He is a Writing Fellow and Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He writes regularly for The Hindu, Frontline, Newsclick, and BirGün.