66. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS,
MARCH 23, 2022
TomGram, TomDispatch, February 6, 2022. Nan Levinson, How (Not) to Stop America's Wars
Nan Levinson, How (Not) to Stop
America's Wars
TomGram, TomDispatch,
February 6, 2022
Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional
complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It's capable of funding itself at
staggering levels, producing weaponry (however
inefficient, ineffective, and anything but inexpensive) largely without
oversight, and fighting wars (however disastrous) in a similar fashion --
all of this almost unnoticed in this country much of the time. Sadly
enough, this has, in a sense, been the history of America in the
twenty-first century.
Whether the public
supported or rejected any of it -- and there's polling evidence of
rejection finally settling in -- the very idea of this country endlessly
warring abroad has mattered remarkably little here much of the time. Yes,
there was that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when concerned
citizens turned out to protest in
remarkable numbers. But most of the time, America's wars (and the
overwhelmingly expensive preparations for them) have gone on with the most
minimal resistance.
And blame for that, at
least in part, can certainly be placed on one key response to the disaster
of the Vietnam War and the enormous antiwar movement of those years, which
even made its way into the military itself: the ending in 1973 of
the draft and the creation of an "all-volunteer" military. That
had the effect of locking the troops, too, inside the self-propelled
machine with which Washington has tried to make itself the true hyperpower
of planet Earth at the point of a bayonet or perhaps, in this century,
a drone.
In that context,
consider it little short of a miracle -- as TomDispatch regular Nan
Levinson, author of War Is Not a Game: The New
Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, [Originally
published: November 10, 2014] describes today --
that, while so many Americans ignored our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
along with the global war on terror more generally, a surprising number of
American vets (and sometimes even active-duty soldiers) did try to protest or
organize to stop those very wars. Did they succeed? Hardly. Still, it's
something of a miracle, under the circumstances, that they even made the
attempt. With that in mind, let Levinson, an expert on the subject,
look back on these remarkable years of resistance, even if it was too
minimal to be truly effective. Tom
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The Antiwar Movement
That Wasn't Enough
The Wars We Couldn't
End
By Nan Levinson
When I urge my writing
students to juice up their stories, I tell them about "disruptive
technologies," inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably
changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep
into history, steamships. It's the tech version of what we used to call a
paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)
Certain events function
that way, too. After they occur, it's impossible to go back to how things
were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and
9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn't hard now to remember what it was like to
catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the
slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried
about underwear bombers or
explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren't incessantly
at war either.
Click here to read more of this
dispatch.
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US defense to its workforce: Nuclear war can be
won
By Alan Kaptanoglu, Stewart Prager., Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists February 2, 2022.
Ronald Reagan and
Mikhail Gorbachev once said that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought,” and five major nuclear weapon states, including the United States,
repeated this statement earlier this year. Yet many in the US defense
establishment—the military, government, think tanks, and industry—promote the
perception that a nuclear war can be won and fought. Moreover,
they do so in a voice that is influential, respected, well-funded, and treated
with deference. The US defense leadership’s methodical messaging to its
workforce helps shape the views of this massive, multi-sector constituency that
includes advocates, future leaders, and decision makers. It advances a view of
nuclear weapon policies that intensifies and accelerates the new nuclear arms
race forming between the United States, China, and Russia.
Perhaps
these beliefs are unsurprising, coming as they are from the defense leaders of
a global superpower. But given humankind’s stake in the information that US
service members receive regarding their roles in the nuclear weapons complex,
US defense leadership messaging warrants a spotlight. This is especially
necessary, given the current crisis in Ukraine.
The 23-chapter Guide
to Nuclear Deterrence in the Age of Great Power Competition [ https://atloa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Guide-to-Nuclear-Deterrence-in-the-Age-of-Great-Power-Competition-Lowther.pdf] provides an
excellent and representative case study for examining this critical messaging.
This guide is published by the Louisiana Tech Research Institute, which
provides support for the US Air Force Global Strike Command. . . .The guide’s
messaging is comprehensive but dangerously skewed. MORE
https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/us-defense-to-its-workforce-nuclear-war-can-be-won/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThusdayNewsletter02032022&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NuclearWarCanBeWon_02022022
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