America is at war
Americans are looking at Ukraine.
We are going through a period of moral clarity. Russia is uniquely bad. Ukraine is heroic.
Americans forget: We are nearly always at war.
With Ukraine front and center, other conflicts have dropped out of sight, but they are still going on. War is a tool in the great game of geopolitical advantage and disadvantage. We forget about the tragedy in Yemen. Could Americans find Yemen on an unmarked map? Do we know what is happening there?
In 2015, under President Obama, the U.S. began active support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition which had begun airstrikes against Yemen. We are the primary supplier of Saudi weapons and we provide intelligence and command-and-control operational support for their air campaign. Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, Amnesty International, and Médicines Sans Frontières all report intentional targeting of civilians, including hospitals and humanitarian aid facilities. They report the Saudi coalition uses cluster bombs in crowded civilian areas, a war crime.
My post yesterday drew Herb Rothschild's attention. He has been an advocate for Civil Rights, the environment, and peace for over five decades. Rothschild grew up in Louisiana and was a professor of English at LSU. He just published a book that describes his participation in the Civil Rights era in Louisiana, The Bad Old Days. He worked in the peace movement in Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, and now at his home in Southern Oregon.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
A day or two before you published yesterday’s blog about Tulsi Gabbard’s opposition to our nation’s foreign policy and particularly what she sees as our pushing Russia into invading Ukraine, there was an op ed in the New York Times about her by Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at The Newmark School of Journalism of the City University of New York. Beinart faulted people on both the Left and the Right, including Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, Keith Olbermann and Whoopi Goldberg, for calling her (and Tucker Carlson) a traitor.
Beinart mentioned something about Gabbard you didn’t: she served on active duty in Iraq and her experience there made her a confirmed foe of U.S. militarism. He quoted her as saying that what she witnessed there “changed my life completely, as an individual as well as my perspective on the world.”
Beinart mentioned something about Gabbard you didn’t: she served on active in Iraq and her experience there made her a confirmed foe of U.S. militarism. He quoted her as saying what she witnessed “changed my life completely, as an individual as well as my perspective on the world.”
I can resonate with that. Unlike Gabbard, I won’t give Putin a pass for invading Ukraine. War is a crime, and I regard anyone who chooses to start one—including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Donald Trump—as a war criminal. But like her and many others, including NYT columnist Thomas Friedman (see here), I wrote in Ashland.news about deliberate U.S./NATO provocation. See, for example, Ashland News and again here.Beyond the immediate matter of whether we might have prevented the suffering of Ukrainians by acceding to Russia’s repeated requests that we pledge not to keep open the prospect of NATO membership for yet another country on Russia’s border, I resonate with Gabbard’s general denunciation of what you called “America’s military and foreign policy establishment” but which I would write as “military/foreign” policy establishment. The two are inextricably intertwined.
We go to war more than any other nation. Further, we promote war-making by selling weapons to other nations—for example, Saudi Arabia’s long-running war on Yemen, in which the casualties dwarf those in Ukraine. From 2017 through 2021, we sold over $52 billion of arms, more than twice what Russia, the #2 merchant of death, sold. Sales to the Saudis were 23% of our total.
The close nexus between the military-industrial complex and those who make our foreign policy isn’t hard to document. For example, a think tank named the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) lists its donors on its website. In FY2021, its two biggest donors (both >$500,000) were Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and the Dept. of Defense. I’ll conclude this piece by listing those associated with CNAS who’ve entered the Biden Administration:
· Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
· Ely Ratner, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense
· Susanna V. Blume, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense
· David Cohen, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
· Derek Chollet, Counselor of the U.S. Department of State
· Colin Kahl, Under Secretary for Defense
· Peter Harrell, Senior Director for International Economics and Competitiveness on the National Security Council staff
· Elizabeth Rosenberg, Counselor to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury focused on international issues
· Kayla M. Williams, Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs