Category: U.S. Wars

The Woman Who Said No

By now it’s conceded that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake or much worse. It was based on the fear that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction he was prepared to use and ties to al-Qaida, the terrorist group responsible for the 9-11 attack. He didn’t. The war was meant to lead to a democratic Iraq and a more peaceful Middle East. It didn’t. Instead, a devastating, prolonged conflict took 4,600 American lives and as many as half a million Iraqi ones. It set the stage for other equally dubious invasions that roiled the Middle East and North Africa, creating more than a million refugees. Today the fighting still continues for reasons that remain unclear.

In his new book, “War Made Invisible,” political analyst Norman Soloman recalls the enthusiasm with which Americans, the media in particular, greeted the war. Cheerleading doesn’t quite convey the coverage. It was a kind of exaltation, the lone superpower bringing justice to the world. Setting an example, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called the war “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.” Iraq must be bombed, he said, “over and over and over again.  Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week so no one will know when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.” For this inspired commentary Friedman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Amid the clamor for battle, writes Solomon, there was one sober voice. Ashleigh Banfield was an up-and-coming TV star who reported from war zones in a casual, winning manner. TV producers and critics were delighted by a captivating blond so comfortable in front of a camera. Said MSNBC President Eric Sorenson: “She’s the age of the audience we want and she’s a great communicator in the authoritative energetic way this generation wants.”

Ashleigh Banfield

But in contrast to the producers back home, Banfield actually experienced the war and decided it should be made more visible. A few weeks into what seemed to be an overwhelming victory, she gave a speech noting some of the grim realities of war.  “What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism.”

Attuned to invisibility, TV management was aghast. What was this outrageous blond up to? NBC stalwarts said she didn’t speak for the network and must choose her words more carefully. Not that she was given the chance. Later she described how she was treated for many months after her unacceptable speech. She had no work or office or equipment. A kind of solitary prisoner, Soviet style, she begged to be let out of her contract. But NBC President Neal Shapiro wouldn’t hear of it for fear she would take her brand to another network and make a success of it. “Maybe that’s why he chose to keep me in a warehouse,” she concludes. When she finally left, she went on to other TV journalism while NBC continued to report its invisible war.

Today the mainstream media has found another war to act in unison on – Ukraine. But it doesn’t enjoy the monopoly it once had. Dissent is easily available on the internet, and significant public figures like Donald Trump and Robert F. Kenedy Jr., have expressed their opposition to the war. Maybe Ashleigh Banfield set an example.

Evolution Wins along with War

The courtroom combat was a clear mismatch. The most celebrated defense attorney in the U.S., Clarence Darrow, was pitted against the boisterous spokesman of populism, William Jennings Bryan. It was, said many, a contest of wit against half-wit over the credibility of evolution. This famous encounter In the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of 1925 is described, blow by legal blow, in a recently published book, “Trial of the Century,” by Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, who while sympathetic to the lost cause of Bryan, makes it clear that the good guy won: “Darrow’s brilliant and devastating cross-examination of Bryan turned the tide in education. It spelled the beginning of the end of the kind of religious intrusion our Constitution forbids. The wonders and benefits of science were untethered. Generations of Americans became Darrow’s beneficiaries.”

Known derisively as the “Monkey trial,” the event was more spectacle than substance. People flocked to it to see the grandiloquent orator Bryan in action, even if content was not always up to delivery. Twice nominated for the U.S. Presidency by the Democratic Party, he lost both elections to Republicans but remained a key figure in American politics as the tireless spokesman for the underprivileged and overlooked people of the farm and prairie states. As such, he is given much credit for the expansion of democracy in his era.

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan (right) during the Scopes Trial in 1925. 1925. Brown Brothers, Sterling, PA.

But reasoned debate was not his strong point. Knowing this, Darrow called him as a witness for his defense of John Scopes, a local schoolteacher who had been arrested for teaching evolution in violation of state law for which he could even go to prison. Evolution, insisted believers, contradicted the Biblical account of Creation. The trial judge and the community were sympathetic to the prosecution, but they had not counted on Darrow who in cross-examination mercilessly challenged Bryan’s literal interpretation of the Bible. Did he really believe that the Old Testament Prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then disgorged still alive three days later? Sweating and fanning himself in the summer heat, Bryan gave an evasive answer, disappointing his followers to the delight of his opponents.

Illustration from page 88 of The World’s Most Famous Court Trial. 1925. Unknown engraver.

Darrow lost the battle. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 with no jail time. But Darrow won the war in that his courtroom performance largely discredited fundamentalist doubts about evolution. Yet there was more to Bryan than evolution. With his rousing oratory in a time of no radio or tv, he became the leading opponent of U.S. involvement in the stupendous carnage of World War One. As U.S. Secretary of State, he pressed President Woodrow Wilson to mediate the conflict. When Wilson chose war instead, he resigned his office. Assured that a majority of Americans shared his view, he proposed a national referendum on the issue. But the peace inclined populace was overruled by a war demanding elite, not for the first or the last time. A growing consensus a century later suggests that U.S. entrance into the war prolonged its savagery, led to a vindictive post war settlement and the emergence of the poisonous ideologies of communism and Nazism. If so, Bryan was as right about war as he was wrong about evolution. For which should he be remembered?

Trump, Biden and War

President Trump based his 2016 campaign on stopping wars, and he pledged at least not to start a new one in contrast to the Obama administration which had launched a series of them, large and small. He kept his word, but in place of the direct killing of war, he substituted the indirect killing of economic sanctions, applied abundantly to countries, companies and individuals that had offended.

These sanctions tend to hurt people but to spare rulers who are well insulated against them. Thus, policies seldom change under economic pressure, and a public may even rally in defense of its leader against foreign interference. As it’s said, carrots should accompany sticks in foreign policy, but so far we see mainly the sticks of sanctions.

A number one target is Iran, which is no threat to the U.S. but is a force in the region and an enemy of Israel. Thus, the purpose of sanctions seems rather nebulous. It’s not entirely clear what Iran must do to lift them. The sanctions on Syria that have led to intense suffering appear to be payback for its ruler Bashar al-Assad remaining in power despite U.S. efforts to remove him. Russia, which came to his defense, is also under U.S. sanctions.

Trump recently vetoed a Congressional resolution to stop U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s war on neighboring Yemen. Yet his backers insist he means what he says, and in his second term he will end the wars. That means confronting an establishment quite solidly opposed to him and also, as he admits, his own White House staff. The neocons among them, especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are intent on war with Iran. Yet he appointed them. Others are available who could carry out his wishes as chief executive.

As a sign of the times, some neocons have jumped ship and joined the Biden campaign. That seems counter-intuitive since as Vice President Biden urged a rather peaceful course on Obama. He wanted to pare down the U.S commitment to Afghanistan and opposed the mindless Libya war. Among Obama advisers on foreign policy, he was considered the most realistic. But is the Biden of those years the less certain, more isolated Biden of today? That can be determined by serious press scrutiny and debates with Trump.

If elected, Biden would be caught between an increasingly divided Democratic Party. A sizable peace movement is growing within, illustrated by the recent primary victory of African American Jamaal Bowman over Eliot Engel, highest ranking Democrat on the House foreign relations committee. U.S Senator Bernie Sanders, runner up to the Presidential nomination, clearly identifies with peace and has a substantial following that will have influence in a Biden administration.

Off setting this is the arrival of a dozen new Democratic House members from defense and intelligence agencies who are more militantly inclined and can swell the ranks of the neocons. Then, too, the party fears being labeled soft on national security, thus providing ammunition to the Republicans. So it seems that no matter who wins in November, war may not be endangered.

Fighting But Not To Win

Hawkish members of Congress and the media have seized on possible intelligence indicating that Russia is paying bonuses to Taliban who kill Americans. Even if it’s true – and it may not be – it’s a pittance compared to the resources the U.S poured into the effort to overthrow the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the l980’s by aiding the rebel Mujahideen. It’s a policy that worked and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There’s no possibility of Russia coming back or even wanting to. Putin, a strict nationalist, hardly compares to the communist Soviet regime spreading a murderous ideology around the world. Yet he has been elevated to the status of foreign devil of the moment by Washingtonians yearning for battle at least from the armchair. Chief among these are the so-called neoconservatives who have managed to play a central role in the foreign policy of the last four Presidencies – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump – exhibiting a knack for political survival while promoting a series of misguided wars.

It began with Afghanistan after the 9/11 attack. The perpetrator Osama bin Laden had been harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan. So the U.S. made a crushing attack on the Taliban and bin Laden was within easy reach. But under neocon pressure, troops were not supplied to keep him from escaping across the border to Pakistan. Instead they were diverted to Bush’s main preoccupation Iraq, where a war was launched on a variety of false pretexts.

With bin Laden still at large, the Bush White House felt free to take on Afghanistan. It was only a matter of weeks, a top anti-terrorism adviser told the Russians: “We’re going to kill them We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.” But as the Russians found out and before them Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and the British, nobody successfully invades Afghanistan. That now includes the U.S., which today faces an enemy as strong as ever.

The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck, 1842, by William Barnes Wollen (1898).

Early on Bush proclaimed, “You’re for us or against us.” There was nothing in between, which includes most of humanity, and at the time two top Taliban leaders who were seeking to overthrow the harsh rule of Mullah Omar and form a government that would be true to Islam and also acceptable to the outside world. They spoke the language of moderation.

Mullah Mohammed Khaksar had been a founder of the Taliban but at great personal risk he went to Pakistan in 1999 on the pretext of receiving medical treatment. In fact, he was there to meet CIA agents to seek U.S. help for the new government he envisioned. He had over a thousand police at his disposal and an alliance with the forces of a top anti-Taliban commander.

But he spoke in vain, as did Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who warned the U.S. of an upcoming bin Laden attack. On arriving in Kabul, the Americans continued to ignore both well-placed defectors. Muttawakil was sent to prison for eighteen months and underwent mild torture. Khaksar asked for protection. It was denied and he was killed by his Taliban enemies. If aided, could they have succeeded and spared the U.S. its longest war?

There’s a tendency to conflate the wars before and after 9/11, but they’re not the same. Judge them as you will, the pre-9/11 conflicts all had a clear purpose: escaping British rule, ending slavery, expanding America, defeating a bellicose Germany, stopping the spread of Soviet communism. Post 9/11 wars, while ceaseless, have only a cloudy or shifting purpose, Afghanistan being the prime example. Its unpopularity rivals that of the Vietnam War with this difference: there’s no draft. U.S. combat deaths remain limited while Afghan casualties, military and civilian. continue to climb. So popular outrage is muted and the war goes on.

Is Assassination Useful?

In 44 BC conspirators favoring a Roman Republic stabbed famed commander Julius Caesar to death because he seemed to be heading to one-man rule. There followed fourteen years of war involving Caesar’s supporters and opponents. It was won by Caesar’s adopted son Octavius, who as emperor Augustus created a one man rule beyond even Caesar’s imagining. Assassination hadn’t worked.

Continue reading “Is Assassination Useful?”

Julius Caesar in Need Today, a Supreme Strategist with a Clear Purpose

Caesar had a plan and a goal that coincided with his own quest for personal glory: he would conquer Gaul (present-day France along with parts of neighboring countries) for the expansion and security of Rome in 50 BC. That he accomplished in nine years of well executed battles and deft negotiations among warring tribes. It was a conflict on many fronts which required his constant attention. Continue reading “Julius Caesar in Need Today, a Supreme Strategist with a Clear Purpose”