By Eve Ottenberg

The American republic morphed well over a century ago into an empire of many endless wars. With U.S. troops still in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and numerous African countries, with over 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and a war budget of roughly one trillion dollars a year, it’s no surprise that one of our main exports is weapons and that arms merchants call the shots in Washington. Presidents come and go, but the wars don’t: they drag on. And when a president does manage to extract the country from one of these military quagmires, as Biden did in Afghanistan, he gets nothing but grief.

This only serves to encourage barbarity – like freezing Afghanistan’s $7 billion in the bank, while Afghans starve due to the U.S. having bombed their country back almost to the stone age. Afghans need their funds. They have an absolute moral right to them, as most of the world recognises, because famine kills them in greater numbers without those monies. Indeed, after the U.S. military departure, reparations would have seemed to be in order. But no. Washington just stole their money and walked away.

Critiquing this ongoing, multi-war U.S. fiasco over many years is professor Andrew Bacevich. His new book of essays, On Shedding an Obsolete Past, collected from over the past half decade, hammers it home over and over: the U.S. must change course, because the current one is not only unsustainable, it is wrong. Bacevich has a bone to pick with elite centrists like New York Times columnist David Brooks, former president Bill Clinton, prominent Dem John Kerry and the deceased senator John McCain, all of whom “see a world that needs saving and believe that it’s America’s calling to do just that…In fact, this conception of America’s purpose expresses not the intent of providence, which is inherently ambiguous, but their own arrogance and conceit. Out of that conceit comes much mischief. And in the wake of mischief come charlatans like Donald Trump.” With this misbegotten notion having dominated American political life for decades, it is no wonder, as Bacevich writes that “the evils afflicting our nation, lie beyond the power of any mere president to remedy.”

So if the president can’t, who can? An informed, adult population firmly convinced of the wickedness of racism, war and rampant materialism – Dr. Martin Luther King’s trio of American evils, to which Bacevich several times refers. Such people must control the levers of political power, preferably through an unbought congress and media. Unfortunately, they do not. Not even close.

To say Bacevich deplores U.S. military adventures is an understatement. He thinks they should never have happened – from Panama to Iraq to “Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Philippines to Afghanistan (again), Iraq (for the third time) or Syria, authorisation by the United Nations Security Council or Congress ranked as somewhere between incidental and unnecessary.” So they were illegal. Worse – they were imperial. Worse still, they were evil.

Biden did end the Afghan war, but the experience no doubt soured him on other needed military withdrawals, namely from Iraq and Syria. Even if it hadn’t, he would face an epic uproar from congress, the media and other elites, if he attempted such departures – and that’s before he even approaches the thorny issue of how to leave Syria without stabbing our allies, the Kurds, in the back, as Trump did. Thorny but not impossible. The main threat to the Kurds emanates from jihadists and Turkey – NOT from the Syrian government. But try suggesting a rapprochement between the Kurds and Damascus and see where that gets you in Washington. Persona non grata in short order would be my guess. So no, Biden won’t likely bend the rules to save our allies, and since he correctly took Trump to task for his abandonment of those same allies, he’s pretty much left with one option: doing nothing.

How long will U.S. soldiers remain in Iraq and Syria? Let’s just say that at the current rate of political change, if your grandchildren enlist, they could wind up there. The only real hope is that another president will do there what Biden did in Afghanistan, though maybe without the sanctions. That would be a distinct improvement. Meanwhile Bacevich urges his readers to drop the myth that we are part of an indispensable, exceptional empire. He calls for questioning or even ditching the three propositions that, he says, form the post-cold war “elite consensus”: 1) globalisation of corporate capitalism; 2) jettisoning norms derived from Judeo-Christian religious traditions and 3) muscular global leadership exercised by the U.S.

Supposedly “winning” the cold war warped the minds of American’s political class. “But here’s the thing: in reality the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t change everything,” Bacevich writes. “Among the things it left fully intact was a stubborn resistance to learning in Washington. That poses a greater threat to the well-being of American people than communism or terrorism ever did.” Few have said it better than that.

Communism and terrorism are small potatoes compared to what our rapacious economic system, hyper-militarism and donor-bought government inflicts on Americans and on multitudes of the world’s people. From the vantage point of the 2020s, communism and terrorism look more like handy bogeymen, used for the vile purpose of manipulating American public opinion. Communism was thus deployed much longer, because even after the Soviet Union’s demise, mass psychosis regarding it continues to percolate through the American nation’s bloodstream, most recently causing fevers over China. The anti-communist spirochete appear incurable. Terrorism, on the other hand, only swung into sharp focus after 9-11, but soon achieved status as a national hallucination, revealing its utility as a casus belli in places that had nothing to do with the assault on the World Trade Towers.

So much for our noble wars. The world would be a better place, and so would the U.S., had they never happened.

First published in COUNTERPUNCH on DECEMBER 30, 2022

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BY Djamel LABIDI

So far only Russia has respected a red line, that of not attacking a NATO country. NATO did not respect any red lines.

Or rather, NATO pushed them back incessantly, from the supply of the first anti-armor and anti-aircraft weapons to "patriot" missiles and tanks, including long-range multi-rocket guns (Himars) and another French Caesar cannon, and so, little by little, until almost direct confrontation with Russia by long-range missile attacks. This possibility can no longer be ruled out in the continual US escalation and the almost insane idea of certain bellicose circles that they can go ever further, without the risk of a global response from Russia.

How can they be so sure? Only the Russians today seem to fear a nuclear deflagration and multiply their warnings on this subject. When Vladimir Putin speaks of Russia's strategic superiority in terms of nuclear weapons, in particular with the new hypersonic weapons, Westerners answer him that it is boasting or that they are useless in Ukraine since it is This is a conventional war. They even laugh in his face, telling him that he should have invested better in equipping his soldiers than in such ultra-sophisticated weapons. They dismiss all his warnings with contempt. The United States only sees it as blackmail, a bluff.

They repeat it so often that we have to think that they really believe it and that it is not for them a simple tactic, a simple ruse of war. We are therefore obliged to try to understand why they believe it so strongly and to take this American conviction seriously. What is she up to? What mechanism does it obey? We have to find an explanation.

The explanation could lie in an approach to the nuclear question, or even in a nuclear ideology that was shaped as the war in Ukraine developed. This ideology has two components: a vision of conventional warfare and a vision of nuclear deterrence.

conventional warfare

For the United States, they have said it and brought it to light, the conventional war armed by them, led by Ukraine, must last and definitively weaken Russia. They manage it, they direct it, they orient it according to this geopolitical objective. In this vision, conventional warfare is no longer considered only as an option imposed by the nuclear environment of the conflict, but as the best means of achieving their objectives concerning Russia. This nuance is important. Conventional warfare then becomes itself a strategic objective, to be maintained, to be maintained. At each stage in the evolution of the conflict, there will be an escalation, intended to prolong conventional warfare, to develop it, to drive it further and further in terms of the consumption of material and human resources, in short to weaken more and more Russia following the decided strategy. Moreover, this logic inevitably leads to wanting to achieve military parity between Ukraine and Russia, that is to say, to equip Ukraine with American weapons equivalent to those of Russia, and therefore also to equip it long-range missiles. It can therefore lead to a global war.

The escalation in this conventional war thus becomes itself a necessity to maintain this war, and then relegates, among decision-makers in the United States, to the background, the awareness of the risks of this escalation.

Convinced of the merits of their strategy in Ukraine, sure that it allows them the maximum of advantages without great damage to them, obsessed with their geopolitical objectives, the United States can be blinded or blinded. They will then reason and act as if the two wars, conventional and nuclear, are impermeable to each other, whereas on the contrary, one can lead to the other by the very fact that it concerns two great powers. nuclear.

nuclear deterrence

But this idea that the war in Ukraine, come what may, is conventional may not be the main reason for the underestimation of the nuclear risk among American leaders. There is above all, in certain ruling circles, an idea, a subjective vision, a vision which rests on no objective foundation, on no empirical certainty, an idea which is in fact arbitrary, that nuclear deterrence imposes conventional warfare since it prevents any recourse to nuclear weapons, because such recourse would mean reciprocal annihilation.

Therefore, if one follows such reasoning, nuclear weapons cannot be used. But it is exactly the opposite: it is to the extent that nuclear weapons can be used that they are a deterrent. One can imagine the seriousness of the misinterpretation.

This is probably what Russia wants to signal by showing off its latest weapons. Moreover, even the theory of reciprocal annihilation deserves to be put into perspective since all the efforts of the major military powers consist in developing nuclear means which neutralize those of the adversary, which protect them from a first strike. enemy or annihilate it first. But it is this gearing which, in fact, represents an even greater danger.

Much of the conflict in Ukraine as well as the "NATO" of countries close to Russia's borders is part of this deadly spiral. It is the encirclement by NATO that pushed Russia to develop its nuclear technology to have weapons which compensate by their speed and their technology for this encirclement. We thus find ourselves, on both sides, Russia and the United States, faced with this paradox where nuclear deterrence constantly leads to a nuclear arms race, in order to gain an advantage over the adversary, and therefore upset the existing balance and therefore ultimately the situation of reciprocal nuclear deterrence.

In summary, the nuclear ideology of the United States, as it appears in the Ukrainian conflict, is revealed by the extreme risk behavior of its management of the conventional war in Ukraine. This behavior is only the counterpart of a conception of nuclear deterrence which tends to greatly underestimate the risk of nuclear war in a conflict which directly or indirectly opposes two major nuclear powers and which has geopolitical ramifications.

The red lines

By demonstrating its new nuclear weapons, Russia is not straying from the subject of the war in Ukraine, is not doing so, as stupid and primitive Western propaganda claims, because it is suffering military setbacks on the field, in conventional warfare, but to draw attention to the inevitable link between conventional warfare and nuclear warfare when the conflict involves two major nuclear powers. The demonstration that Russia makes of its nuclear forces would then have the intention of reminding the ruling circles of the United States, the least warmongering, the most responsible, of the existence of a balance of nuclear forces to the disadvantage of the United States. From this perspective, the possibility thus underlined of a nuclear war, real and not theoretical, would then come to retroact on the conventional war in progress and indicate its red lines.

It can be said that there is a vast underestimation of a nuclear conflict in a part of the current American ruling circles, the most warmongering part, the most dominating. They are the ones who are behind the devastating go-to-war propaganda that, from the United States, is spreading through all the Western media. Everything is done to demobilize people about the dangers of a third world war. Everything is done to minimize this danger. We make fun of those who invoke it, we treat them as defeatists. Everything is done to treat this war as a classic war, of one country attacking another, of a war bordering on colonialism. Everything is done to deny the new, historically unknown character of this war in Ukraine.

Imagine if in Yugoslavia, Iraq, or Libya, Russia or China had interfered and interposed as the United States is doing now in Ukraine. The situation would have been dangerous for world peace. They did not do this despite their extreme hostility to these adventures. They were responsible.

By their nuclear adventurism, those who currently direct the policy of the United States are not worthy of the responsibilities conferred on them by the enormous power of their country.

The minority that rules the United States exploits the power of the United States for its own benefit. She is carried away by a desire for hegemony, which blinds her. Only the American people could use this colossal power in a wise, responsible way, useful for mankind. Hopefully that day will come. Or is it a utopia? Or is it already too late?

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