OMNI
NEWSLETTER NUMBER 14 ON THE US
EMPIRE, THE US NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
Compiled by Dick Bennett, Building a Culture of Peace
and Justice.
US Imperialism Newsletters
#1 July 3, 2007
#2 Sept. 20, 2007
#3 April 7, 2008
#4 Nov. 30, 2008
#5 September 13, 2011
#6 October 16, 2011
#7 January 16, 2012
#8 June 3, 2012
#9 Oct. 20, 2012
#10 April 5, 2013
#11 June 3, 2013
#12 July 19, 2013
#13 Sept. 3, 2013
(Tell me if you find any error.)
“The question, patently, is not whether we are willing
to socialize but what. ‘The
socialization of death,’ says Michael Harrington, ‘is, thus far at least, much
more generally popular than the socialization of life.’ The military have become ardent and dangerous
competitors for power in American society.”
J. William Fulbright, The Crippled
Giant (1972, 253).
My blog: It's the War Department
Newsletters: Laying
the foundation for peace, justice, and ecology in knowledge.
Index:
See: Afghan/US
War, Costs of War, Consequences of War, US Imperialism, US Imperialism Continental Westward Expansion, US Imperial Pacific E.
Asia Expansion, US Leaders Imperial Lawlessness, Iraq/US War,
McCarthyism Ongoing, US Military Industrial Complex, Militarism, US National
Security State, Pentagon, Pentagon: Suicides, Pentagon: Whistleblowing,
Torture, War Crimes, and more.
A wide-ranging source of
information is the Defense News Early Bird Brief: : http://omsswar.blogspot.com/2012/03/defense-news-early-bird-brief_14.html
Nos. 7-13 below.
Contents #14
RESISTANCE TO US EMPIRE
Davies, Most
Expensive and Powerful Military Does Not Bring Safety
Blum: Empire, Communism and Other Threats, Vital US Interests,
Domino Dogma
Gurman,
Counterinsurgency from Malaya and Vietnam
to Iraq and Afghanistan
Turse, Special
Operations Command, Secret Military
Monbiot, Lawless Double
Standards of US Exceptionalism
Hart, US Broadcast
Media Supported Attack on Syria
RESISTANCE TO US
EMPIRE
Dick, Informed Citizens versus US Perpetual War,
Resistance II
Tomgram/Hiro,
Global Resistance to the Empire
Articles Via
Historians Against War
Dick, Books on US Empire
Contacts for Arkansas Congressional
Representatives
Contents to Earlier
Empire Newsletters
Myths
of US Innocence and Freedom
In
its editorial of March 23, 2011, the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette repeated the old imperial lie: “But of course America America America
Little of this is true. And its sweeping anti-Islamic message
is a call to kill. Who
cried “Death to America
Neither is the second myth
true. Our youth
continue to join the military and die in combat, our leaders continue to foment
wars, and our wars continue hardly without cessation for a hundred years partly
because our troops are said to be defending our freedom. That’s a cruel falsehood to the dead
and wounded soldiers and their grieving families, since the freedoms have been
diminishing in direct correlation to the increase and continuation of our
wars. You remember the Cold
War and McCarthyism, including the 1950 Internal Security Act, the 1951 Supreme
Court Dennis decision, the 1964 Communist Control
Act. But
you might have forgotten President
Reagan’s assaults on our freedoms—McCarthyism’s extension: the gag rule for public officials,
Executive Order 12356 increasing the secrecy classification, increased use of
the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the McCarran-Walter Act, to mention
only the most infamous. Nor
perhaps do you recall President
Clinton’s 1996 counterterrorism bill: a
special court for secret evidence to deport noncitizens accused of association with groups listed as
“terrorist”; Executive Branch power to criminalize fundraising for lawful
activities conducted by organizations labeled “terrorist”; repealing the Edwards amendment, which
prohibited the FBI from opening investigations based on First Amendment
activities; resurrecting the discredited ideological visa denial provisions of
the McCarran-Walter Act to bar aliens based on their associations rather than
their acts; and especially: creating a new federal crime of terrorism, carving
further exceptions in the time-honored posse comitatus law barring the U.S.
military from civilian law enforcement, expanding use of pre-trial detention,
and loosening the rules governing federal wiretaps.
I have not mentioned the
intrusions into library privacy, and I
assume you do remember the Patriot Act and other intensifications of all of these
restrictions on our freedom that occurred under Bush II’s administration
post-9/11 and continue under Obama.
So long as the myths continue of
enemies who hate us for our freedom, democracy, and affluence (‘our very
existence”?), US imperial interventions will continue, our troops will futilely
die, and our treasure wasted. But
we are not helpless; we are not powerless. We can contribute to an end of US wars
of conquest and of domestic repression (McCarthyism abroad and at home) by
refuting these myths. Knowledge,
reason, evidence can produce changes for the better. Let us therefore not be silent.
At end see a brief list of some
of the scholarship exposing the lies compiled in 2012. .
The
Price of America
A giant military doesn't make the American people safer.
October 21, 2013 |
The idea of U.S. U.S.
Now, successful
diplomacy over Syria Syria
For most of our history,
Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the
20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that
probably killed a million Filipinos, American diplomats played key roles in
the Hague Peace Conferences and
the establishment of international courts, eager to adapt American concepts of
democracy and justice to the international arena to develop alternatives to war
and militarism.
In response to the
horrors of the First World War, an international social movement demanded the
abolition of war. In 1928, the U.S. government responded by
negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for U.S.
Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, in which all major powers renounced "war
as an instrument of national policy." The treaty failed to prevent
the Second World War, but it provided the legal basis for the convictions of
German leaders at Nuremberg U.S.
The allied defeat of Germany and Japan
in the Second World War was not the result of American military supremacy, but
of an alliance across ideological lines with imperial Britain and the communist Soviet
Union , based on mutual trust, vigorous diplomacy and the
recognition of a common existential threat. Most Americans believed at
the time that the war would lead to a renewed international commitment to peace
and disarmament, not to an American bid for military supremacy.
American, British and
Soviet leaders agreed that their common interests required what Roosevelt called "a permanent structure of
peace" after the war, through the United Nations and
continued great power diplomacy. The prohibition against the threat or use of force is
a key provision of the UN Charter. But Roosevelt's death deprived America
Truman mistrusted the
Soviets and never shared Roosevelt 's
commitment to work with them in a spirit of mutual respect. He quickly
fell under the influence of hawkish advisers like his Chief of Staff Admiral
Leahy, Ambassador Harriman and Navy Secretary Forrestal, and he condemned the
Russians harshly at every turn during negotiations on the contours of the
post-war world. Truman embraced Churchill's self-fulfilling declaration
of an "iron curtain" across
Europe and his dark view of America
What emboldened the
former Senator from Missouri to squander the
fruits of Roosevelt 's astute diplomacy?
In great part, it was "the bomb." The U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons in the late
1940s gave rise to a newly aggressive posture in U.S.
foreign policy, including desperate calls to destroy the Soviet
Union in a massive nuclear holocaust before it could develop its
own nuclear deterrent.
Fortunately for all of
us, wiser heads prevailed and a nuclear war was avoided. The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists and wartime American and British military leaders
warned that attacking the U.S.S.R. would unleash an even more terrible war than
the one the world had just survived. U.S. Army Chief of Staff General
Eisenhower made an early venture into politics with a speech in St. Louis,
saying, "I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the high degree of
security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight… Those who
measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and
mislead those who pay them heed."
Many Americans accepted
their government's claims that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shortened the
war with Japan and saved American lives, but the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded
that, "Japan would have surrendered, even if the atomic bombs had not been
dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had
been planned or contemplated." In fact, Japan
But America 's monopoly on nuclear weapons
transformed U.S.
The U.S. and U.K.
could not prevent most of the countries of Eastern Europe from falling into the
Soviet political and economic orbit once they were liberated by the Red Army
and communist resistance forces, any more than the Russians could bring their
communist allies to power in Western-occupied France ,
Italy or Greece U.S. U.S.
As the Soviets developed
their own nuclear arsenal, the U.S. Germany and Japan
The almost unbelievable
record of American militarism since 1945 is that, despite the most sustained
and expensive military build-up in the history of the world and the tragic
annihilation of millions of people, the United States Korea ,
bringing China into the war
and devastating North and South
Korea Vietnam America 's only real military successes have been
limited campaigns to restore friendly regimes in three small strategic outposts:
Grenada ; Panama ; and Kuwait
Surveying the ruins of U.S. policy at
the end of the American War in Vietnam ,
Richard Barnet put his finger on the irony of America
But the lessons of Vietnam were gradually eroded by a revival of U.S. Angola ,
Afghanistan and Central
America, and invasions of Grenada
and Panama , Bush refused Iraq 's offers to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait
The fall of the U.S.S.R.
was a critical factor in U.S.
military expansion in the Middle East .
As Pentagon adviser Michael Mandelbaum said in 1991,
"For the first time in 40 years we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War
III." The "peace dividend" Americans expected at the end
of the Cold War was trumped by a "power dividend," as policy-makers
exploited the fall of the Soviet Union to project U.S. military power around
the world. New interventionist doctrines of " reassurance", " humanitarian intervention",
"responsibility to protect",
" information warfare"
and " preemption" have
served as political cover for violating the UN Charter's prohibition on the
threat or use of force, culminating in the travesty of Barack Obama's speech justifying war as
he accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Since Vietnam Hanoi
Now we have spent 12
years at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia
(along with covert operations across the entire globe, from Sweden to the Philippines to Colombia). We have
brought death, injury, devastation and chaos to hundreds of millions more
people, with no end in sight as the "Long War" keeps spreading from
country to country. Nowhere have our leaders achieved their original
stated intentions to reduce terrorism, prevent weapons proliferation or
establish democracy. Their increasingly desperate rationalizations for a
murderous, out-of-control policy, repeated ad nauseam by a craven corporate
propaganda system, can barely disguise their humiliation.
Like Americans in the
late 1940s who were desperate to destroy the U.S.S.R. in a
"preemptive" nuclear war, some Americans today may still not
understand why our military supremacy cannot bring us political power over
enemies with fewer resources and inferior weapons. But, as Eisenhower and
other American war leaders understood only too well, the use of force is a
blunt and brutal instrument, and more powerful weapons are only more powerful,
not magical. The use of force is always destructive, not constructive,
and being killed or maimed by shrapnel and high explosives is no cleaner or
kinder because missiles are more expensive or more sophisticated.
Political power is something quite different, requiring popular support and
legitimacy and policies that actually solve problems.
So military supremacy is
not a trump card to achieve political objectives; the use of force is
inherently destructive; and war nearly always causes more problems than it
solves. Killing people to save them from an oppressive government is an
absurdity, and "regime change" is generally a euphemism for
"regime destruction," with no ability to ensure that what comes after
will be better, especially once the violence and chaos of war are added to the
problems that led to it in the first place.
Norwegian General Robert
Mood led the UN monitors sent to Syria
Threatening the use of
force while hoping not to have to use it may seem like a less painful way for
our leaders to impose their will on other countries, but in practice this
doesn't work very well either. It forces both sides into positions from
which neither can afford to back down, putting the credibility of our
military supremacy on the line over every crisis around the world. This
has turned manufactured disputes over non-existent weapons into a choice
between war and political humiliation for American leaders, as we saw with Iraq and, incredibly, are now going through all
over again with Iran
Despite nearly bankrupting our country, military
supremacy remains an expensive national ego-trip in search of a constructive
purpose. Countries that are not cursed with military supremacy have to
settle their differences by other means, notably by diplomacy within the rule
of international law. As we have found out over Syria
The victory of democracy in America 's
debate over Syria U.S. Syria ,
to restore civilized relations with Iran
Nicolas J. S. Davies is author of Blood On Our Hands: The
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
Uncle Sam: Top Menace
to Peace on/and Earth
According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68
countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and
Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States
as the most significant threat to peace on the planet. The
This poll was met with deafening silence
across the dominant U.S. U.S.
Typical of that dismissal was an International
Business Times headline that questioned the validity and/or
rationality of the finding. “In Gallup Poll,” the headline read, “Leading
Threat to World Peace is…America
Editors at the right-wing New
York Post responded with
literally world-weary disgust at those who just “don’t like the U.S.
“It hasn’t turned out that way, as these Gallup U.S.
For any serious and honest
observer of
The Obama administration deploys Special Operations forces in 75
to 100 countries (up from 60 at the end of the George W. Bush administration)
and conducts regular lethal drone attacks against officially designated terrorists
(and a much larger number of innocent civilians) in the Middle East, Southwest
Asia and Africa. It maintains a massive global surveillance program dedicated
to the elimination of privacy on Earth—a program that has spied even on the
personal cell phones of European heads of state, including Germany Der Speigel , Germany ’s
leading newspaper noted in 1997: “Never before in modern history has a country
dominated the earth as totally as the United States America
An “Aerial Traffic Jam” Above a “One-Sided Slaughter” (Iraq
Perhaps Der
Spiegel’s editors were
thinking of U.S. conduct in Iraq U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands of
surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait U.S. U.S. Vietnam U.S. U.S.
Less than a year after his forces inflicted this unthinkable
carnage, U.S. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed that, “A world once divided
into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America Rogue State
No Cruelty Too Great
The mass-murderous “turkey-shoot” conducted by the forces of
“decency” in 1991 was consistent with the United States
Perhaps Der
Spiegel’s editors were also
reflecting on economic sanctions and U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
Five years after “the Highway of Death,” Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl
that the death of half a million Iraqi children due to U.S.-imposed economic
sanctions was a “price…worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. United States
This, too, was nothing new. As Chomsky noted in 1992, reflecting
on U.S. efforts to maximize
suffering in Vietnam by
blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated
after the Vietnam War ended: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington
Sons and Daughters
The imperial sadism has continued into the current millennium. The
world’s “Schwarzenegger” since September 11, 2001 has gone off on a rampage,
killing, maiming, and displacing millions across the Muslim World as part of
its Global War on/of Terror (GWOT).
In a foreign policy speech
he gave on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Uncle Sam’s 21st
century cruelty peaked, perhaps, in Fallujah ,
Iraq U.S.
war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of
civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical
leveling of an entire city by the U.S.
By one account: “The U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Grozny in Chechnya
“So You Stuff ’Em in Guantanamo
Lawrence Wilkerson is a former combat officer and onetime chief of
staff to George W. Bush’s Secretary of States Colin Powell. Speaking to
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, he described a typical Special Forces
operation during the occupation of Iraq Guantanamo
Anyone who thinks U.S. Washington ’s failed
ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The tone was set from the start, with Obama signing off on two
major drone strikes in Pakistan
A
military source told Scahill about a standard Special Forces kill operation in
the Age of Obama: “If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s
thirty-four [other] people in the building, then thirty-five people are going
to die.”
An illustrative incident in the U.S. U.S.
air-strikes killed more 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan ’s Farah Province U.S. York
Times reported: “In a phone
call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to…the Afghan Parliament, the
governor of Farah
Province
The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific
incident—one among many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and
Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban
grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about
loss of innocent life, but the Administration refused to issue an apology or to
acknowledge U.S.
The disparity was remarkable: frightening New Yorkers led to a
full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing
more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology. Nobody had to be
fired. And the Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how
the civilians perished—stories that were taken seriously by corporate media.
The U.S. subsequently
conducted a dubious “investigation” of the Bola Boluk slaughter that slashed
the civilian body count and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way
of U.S.
“Peace prize? He’s a killer.” Thus spoke a young Pashtun man to an Al Jazeera English reporter on December 10,
2009—the day Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. “The man spoke from the
village of Armal, where a large crowd gathered around the bodies of twelve
people, one family from a single home, all killed by U.S. Special Forces during
a late-night raid. ”
Top Threat to Livable Ecology
The U.S. U.S. Washington
delights now in blaming China
This is a smokescreen designed to cloak the United States U.S. U.S. United States —an historical reality that neither
China nor India
No nation has invested more heavily and powerfully in the
political, ideological, and military promotion and defense of the at once
carbon- and growth- addicted profits system than the United States U.S.
No national government has done more to deep-six increasingly
desperate international efforts to reduce global carbon emissions than that of
the United States
And the U.S. China and India England ’s Socialist
Worker, “Simply looking at China China China China China America
All of this is consistent with a finding in a 2007 Pew Global
Attitude survey. In 34 of 37 countries where the public was asked “which
country has done the most to hurt the world’s environment?,” majorities or
pluralities named the United
States
Eco-cide is no small misdeed in global eyes. “Pollution and
environmental” problems were identified in the 2007 Pew poll as the “greatest
world danger” (above nuclear proliferation, AIDS and other infectious diseases,
religious and ethnic hatred and income inequality) by the public of a large
number of nations including Canada, Sweden, Spain, Ukraine, China, and India, 2007
Pew Global Attitude Survey).
“The Self Righteous Who Think They Are Without Sin”
Could surveys like the 2013
WINMR-Gallup poll, the 2006
But for the reality of global opinion indicating widespread,
longstanding, legitimate, and continuing fear of, the U.S. to sink in and
influence mass U.S. opinion, two obstacles have to be overcome. The first is
the refusal of the managers and owners of dominant U.S. mass media to seriously
report on the views of people beyond U.S. borders—a reflection of U.S.
policymakers’ longstanding indifference to the opinions of those over whom they
have exercised power beyond U.S. shores. (Not that those policymakers care much
about public opinion inside the U.S., see Paul Street, “No Functioning
Democracy,” ZMagazine, September 2013).
The second is the barrier that the nationally narcissistic
doctrine of an intrinsically generous and noble America poses to many U.S.
citizens’ readiness to accept the notion of the U.S. as any kind of threat to
world peace at all, much less the leading threat. Consider the reflections of
former New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer on
the United States ’
annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines , its seizure of Puerto Rico, and its
overthrow of elected governments in Nicaragua
and Honduras United
States United
States
“Generations of American political and business leaders have
recognized the power of the noble idea of American exceptionalism. When they
intervene abroad for selfish or ignoble reasons, they always insist that in the
end, their actions will benefit not only the United States but also the
citizens of the country in which they are intervening and, by extension, the
causes of peace and justice in the world” (Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of
Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, New York, 2006).
This problem of “American exceptionalism”—the almost religious
belief that U.S. U.S.
empire, that the world’s people are correct to identify the United States America America U.S.
“Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force
of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint” (U.S.
President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009).
Reading such statements (long standard on the part of U.S.
politicians), I am reminded of psychotherapist M. Scott Peck’s observation that
“The evil in this world is committed by the…self-righteous who think they are
without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant
self-examination…[their] most basic sin is pride —because all sins are
reparable except the sin of believing one is without sin…. They are the people
of the lie” (M. Scott Peck, People
of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, New York, 1983). How
appropriate that the U.S. has retained its status as most dangerous nation in
the world’s eyes after the passage from the more openly and clumsily
imperialist Bush to the more stealthily imperial, supposedly more
peace-oriented Obama.
The world, clearly, is no longer fooled by the great Obama
re-branding of the “Schwarzenegger of international politics.” It properly
understands the latest post- Bush president elected in the name of “hope” and
“change” (watchwords of the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign) to be simply the
empire’s latest new-old clothes.
The Domestic Costs and Benefits of Empire
Where might the seeds of resistance to the Empire and its
malignant doctrine of American exceptionalism lie within the U.S. U.S. peace activists and thinkers should look
particularly to the class nature of U.S.
imperialism and to the question of who within the domestic power structure of
the savagely unequal United
States United States ” is
generally a nice-sounding euphemism for “the profits of the U.S.
As Chomsky noted in 1969, “There are, to be sure, costs of empire
that benefit no one: 50,000 American corpses or the deterioration in the
strength of the United States
Chomsky’s point is no less true today when poverty is rife across
the U.S. even as leading military investors enjoy unimaginable wealth amidst a
“New Gilded Age” in which the 400 richest Americans possess more wealth than
the entire bottom half of the U.S. population—150 million U.S. citizens—and the
top 1 percent possesses as much as the bottom 90 percent.
Ultimately, however, nobody, not even the rich, can fully escape
the horrific consequences of the eco-cidal growth-, waste-, and
petroleum-addicted social order that the U.S.
http://zcomm.org/zmagazine/uncle-sam-top-menace-to-peace-onand-earth/
BLUM: : Empire, Communism and Other Threats, Vital US
WILLIAM BLUM,
EMPIRE REPORT #125, 2-4-14
“JFK,
RFK, and some myths about US
On April
30, 1964, five months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his
brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was interviewed by John B. Martin
in one of a series of oral history sessions with RFK. Part of the interview
appears in the book “JFK Conservative” by Ira Stoll, published three months
ago. (pages 192-3)
RFK: The
president … had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam
MARTIN: What
was the overwhelming reason?
RFK: Just
the loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam Southeast Asia would
fall.
MARTIN: What
if it did?
RFK: Just
have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our
position in a rather vital part of the world. Also it would affect what
happened in India , of
course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East .
Just as it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an
effect on Indonesia Vietnam
MARTIN: There
was never any consideration given to pulling out?
RFK: No.
MARTIN: … The
president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there …
RFK: Yes.
MARTIN: … And
couldn’t lose it.
RFK: Yes.
These
remarks are rather instructive from several points of view:
1.
Robert Kennedy contradicts the many people
who are convinced that, had he lived, JFK would have brought the US involvement in Vietnam
It appears that we’ll never know with any kind of certainty what
would have happened if JFK had not been assassinated, but I still go by his
Cold War record in concluding that US
2.
“Just have profound effects as far as our
position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the
world.”
Ah yes, a vital part of the world. Has there ever been any part
of the world, or any country, that the US United States of America
“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the
things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to
make war.” – Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher
3.
If the US
lost Vietnam “everybody was
quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia
would fall.”
As I once wrote:
Thus it was that the worst of Washington ’s fears had come to pass: All of Indochina – Vietnam , Cambodia
and Laos US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, John
Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and other American officials regularly issued
doomsday pronouncements of the type known as the “Domino Theory”, warning that
if Indochina should fall, other nations in Asia
would topple over as well. In one instance, President Eisenhower listed no less
than Taiwan , Australia , New Zealand ,
the Philippines and Indonesia
Such warnings were repeated periodically
over the next decade by succeeding administrations and other supporters of US policy in Indochina
as a key argument in defense of such policy. The fact that these ominous
predictions turned out to have no basis in reality did not deter Washington
officialdom from promulgating the same dogma up until the 1990s about almost
each new world “trouble-spot”, testimony to their unshakable faith in the
existence and inter-workings of the International Communist Conspiracy.
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September 29, 2013
Among the
curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency
hasn’t gotten its full due. After decades in which “the imperial
presidency” was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W.
Bush in which a literal cult of executive power -- or to use the term of that
moment, “the unitary executive” -- took hold in the White House, and without
any obvious diminution in the literal powers of the presidency, Barack Obama
has managed to look like a bystander at his own funeral. Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power If I had to summarize these years, I would say that he entered the phone booth dressed as Superman and came out as Clark It should be puzzling just how little power the present executive is actually capable of wielding. He can go to the U.N. or Kansas City and make speeches (that themselves often enough implicitly cast him as a kind of interested observer of his own presidency), but nothing much that he says in Washington seems any longer to be seriously attended to. In the foreign policy arena, he is surrounded by a secretary of defense who ducks for cover, a secretary of state who wanders the world blowing off steam, and a national security advisor and U.N. ambassador who seem like blundering neophytes and whose basic ideological stance (in favor of American -- aka “humanitarian” -- interventions globally) has been rejected in this country by almost any constituency imaginable. Unlike previous presidents, he evidently has no one -- no Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker, or even Henry Kissinger -- capable of working the corridors of power skillfully or bringing a policy home. Domestically, who ever heard of a presidency already into its second term that, according to just about all observers, has only one significant achievement -- Obamacare (whatever you think of it) -- and clearly hasn’t a hope in hell of getting a second one? Just as he’s done in Syria, Obama will now be watching relatively helplessly as Republicans in Congress threaten to shut the government down and not raise the debt ceiling -- and whatever happens, who expects him to be the key player in that onrushing spectacle? A World in Which No One Is Listening to the Planet’s Sole Superpower The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam By Dilip Hiro What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known -- repeatedly -- and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East. In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region. In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
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Hearts
and Minds
A People’s History of Counterinsurgency
EDITED BY HANNAH
GURMAN. 2013.
A NEW PRESS
PEOPLE'S HISTORY
HOWARD ZINN, SERIES EDITOR
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL: FROM MALAYA AND VIETNAM
TO IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN
Counterinsurgency is a tactical phoenix, dying only to rise again,
ever-ready to win hearts and minds for the American empire. . . . This essential volume
makes it possible to understand the past and prepare for the next time the
siren song of counterinsurgency is sung.
—MARILYN YOUNG, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
The first book of its kind, Hearts and Minds is a scathing response to the grand
narrative of U.S.
Drawing on leading thinkers in the field and using key examples from Malaya, thePhilippines , Vietnam , El
Salvador , Iraq ,
and Afghanistan
Drawing on leading thinkers in the field and using key examples from Malaya, the
Hannah Gurman is an assistant professor at New York University U.S. New York City
Contributors:
Karl Hack on Malaya
Vina A. Lanzona on the
Hannah Gurman on Vietnam
Joaquín M. Chávez on
Rick Rowley on
David Enders on Iraq Jeremy Kuzmarov on
Jean MacKenzie on
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