OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #167, March 6, 2024

 

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #167, March 6, 2024 

If We Fail to Prevent a War, then We Must Stop the War.

War in Ukraine: MAKING SENSE OF A SENSELESS CONFLICT by
MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES.   

An important antidote to war propaganda” — Mairead McGuire, activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize . 

 

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“Aaron Bushnell’s Divine Violence”  read by Eunice Wong.

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation against the Gaza genocide was ultimately a religious act, one that radically delineates good and evil and calls us to resist.

CHRIS HEDGES Report.    .MAR 2, 2024.

 

In Case You Missed These Episodes:  Catching Up On US Warmaking and Warmakers

Patrick Cockburn. War in the Age of Trump, the Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran (Verso, London, New York). 311 pages. $29.95.    “PATRICK COCKBURN’S ‘WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP’,” Book Review in Realism and Policy by Michael F. Duggan.

 

. . .The book is a collection of essays—a dispatches—from the Middle East from 2016 to 2019.  It covers the war in Syria, the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa, the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the worsening relations between the United States and Iran, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the abandoning of the Kurds by the United States, “the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish states in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared ISIS caliphate, which culminated in death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Cockburn also shows how local players are proxies for great powers. He destroys the illusion that the impulsive and erratic polices of the 45th President of the United States in the region—ostensibly flowing from a revitalized “America first” sense of isolationism—were less problematic than those of previous American leaders.  . . .

The book covers a lot of ground in detail, but for me a powerful overarching theme is that America’s post-September 11 wars of choice have been especially pernicious….

 

 LIES AND LIARS
I like “Part VII: Behind Enemy Lies: War Reporting in the Age of Fake Facts.”

In its intro. Cockburn distinguishes “objective news reporting from propaganda” and gives us some instances of selective or partisan truths used to make large lies.  For instance, the Syrian civilian casualties caused by Syrian and Russian air strikes were copiously reported and internationally condemned.  But the “heavy civilian casualties” in Mosul and Raqqa “when they were being besieged by the US-led coalition and defended by Isis” were reported with “near silence…amounting at times to a media blackout.”  Or, the US air strikes against Mosul 2016-17 were 31 times greater than that acknowledged by the US air force.  Or the bombing of a baby milk plant in Iraq in 2018, which the US claimed was a biological warfare facility.  Or….  Truth-seekers will like this section because it demonstrates “the need for permanent skepticism towards claims by governments” in war (229).  Patrick Cockburn’s “War in the Age of Trump” - Realism and Policy