Why Are We Declaring War on a Bunch of Punks?

Because the repugs can't get it up unless we're massacring brown folks. And they can't win elections unless they've got everybody terrified of a boogeyman under the bed.

Digby:

Maybe some of these right wing panic artists will listen to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. (I doubt it, but it's worth a try.)

The truth is that ISIS and its affiliates don’t pose an “existential threat” to Western societies, and it is laughable to think that they ever could. They arguably don’t pose an “existential threat” to anyone except the people that have unfortunately fallen under their control and possibly their immediate neighbors. At the very least, the threat they pose to us and to other Western nations remains a relatively small and manageable one. The only real “existential threat” that Western nations have faced since WWII was the Soviet Union and their satellites, and in the end the threat from them proved to be a manageable one that the U.S. and its allies successfully faced down and outlasted. ISIS poses a much smaller threat to the U.S. and its allies than the Soviets ever did, and we should not inflate that threat into something that it clearly isn’t. The problem isn’t just that threat inflation is bad analysis (though it is), but that it often leads to reckless and irresponsible policies that aren’t even required to address the danger. Threat inflation prompts us to favor unnecessary and excessive measures here and overseas, and it causes us to obsess over combating certain adversaries to the detriment of other more important interests. Describing something as an “existential threat” is the worst and most irresponsible kind of threat inflation. It is a phrase that ought to be reserved to describe only the most dire threats to our very survival. That doesn’t apply to ISIS or indeed to any terrorist group.

Thank you. But I suspect this is just spitting into the wind. These people deeply desire an "existential" threat so they can justify their free-floating fear of everything and their deep desire for violence to be the silver bullet that will fix it for them. It's primitive human species stuff which civilized leadership from institutions like the church and the government are supposed to mediate. Instead they're stoking it for their own ends.

More rational thought from the Rude Pundit.

Thankful for Alternatives to War

 From Veterans for Peace:

Friday, November 25, 2015 At Thanksgiving, Veterans Call for Return to Nation's Founding Values Fourteen years after the fall of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, Paris, a city beloved by the world, has been dealt deadly blows by fanatical terrorists. It is the worst attack on Paris since World War II. Amid the clamor for revenge, and despite the clear failure of the United States’ so-called war on terror that sparked the destabilization of the Middle East and the rise of ISIL, French President François Hollande has promised a “ruthless” campaign against ISIL, in other words, a war that will be cruel, uncompromising and merciless.  <Full Statement> Download VFP's Suggested Solutions to Confont ISIL which do not include U.S. military action.

Nuke the Saudis. Do It Now.

We've been fighting, overtly or covertly, in the Middle East for a century.  Yet despite battles in nearly every nation, we've never confronted the one country that is really the cause of it all.

At The Nation, Laila Lalami pointed a very direct finger at one kind of Muslim source of violence: the Wahhabi sect that has received vast subsidies from the Saudi government to spread its beliefs via propaganda, mosque construction, and “good works” in a not-so-good cause.

We must call to account the Saudi kings—Salman, Abdullah, and Fahd—whose funding of Wahhabi doctrine gave rise to the scourge of Islamic extremism.

When I was a child in Morocco, no clerics told me what to do, what to read or not read, what to believe, what to wear. And if they did, I was free not to listen. Faith was more than its conspicuous manifestations. But things began to change in the 1980s. It was the height of the Cold War and Arab tyrants saw an opportunity: They could hold on to power indefinitely by repressing the dissidents in their midst—most of them secular leftists—and by encouraging the religious right wing, with tacit or overt approval from the United States and other Western allies. Into the void created by the decimation of the Arab world’s secular left, the Wahhabis stepped in, with almost unlimited financial resources. Wahhabi ideas spread throughout the region not because they have any merit—they don’t—but because they were and remain well funded. We cannot defeat ISIS without defeating the Wahhabi theology that birthed it. And to do so would require spending as much effort and money in defending liberal ideas….

 The beheadings, the crucifixions, the destruction of cultural heritage that ISIS practices—none of these are new. They all happened, and continue to happen, in Saudi Arabia too. The government of Saudi Arabia has beheaded more people this year than ISIS. It persecutes Shias and atheists. It has slowly destroyed sites of cultural and religious significance around Mecca and Medina. To almost universal indifference, it has been bombing Yemen for seven months. Yet whenever terror strikes, it escapes notice and evades responsibility. In this, it is aided and abetted by Western governments, who buy oil from tyrants and sell them weapons, while paying lip service to human rights.

Not to mention nurturing and funding the 9-11 terrorists.

Military intervention has done nothing but exacerbated the problems in the Middle East.  But we've never tried military intervention in Saudi Arabia.

Nuke the Saudis.  Do it now.

Private Guns Way More Deadly Than Public Wars

Digby:

Via Mother Jones, here is a chart which shows that we have had more Americans killed by gun violence since the Reagan Administration than have been killed in all of our wars combined:

I don't know how we can let this go on.

Obviously, we need lots more wars that chew up millions of boots-on-the-ground grunts.  Also an end to the battlefield medical advances that save so many military lives.

How Repug Fear Infantalizes Us

I am continually stunned by how people who lived through World War II and the Cold War - genuine existential threats to our democracy let alone existence - can with a straight face demand hysterical overreaction to a bunch of antediluvian goat-fuckers in the desert.

Digby:

"Nothing matter is we aren't safe..." There you go. That excuses any breach of human decency, law and norm. Because I hate to break the news to people, you will never be perfectly safe. We used to be a mature enough society to understand that. But now that we have the Daddy Party infantilizing us, a whole lot of Americans are so easily frightened they just want to suck their thumbs and hear a nice bedtime story about what good girls and boys they are.

Charlie Pierce:

The fact is that a lot of things "matter" even if we're not "safe." Climate change matters. Income inequality matters. Poverty matters. They "mattered" before September 11, 2001 and they "mattered" afterwards and they "matter" now. (They "mattered" before and after the Oklahoma City bombing, for all that. And Lincoln expanded higher education and built the intercontinental railroad with the goddamn Army Of Northern Virginia a few days' march down the road from Washington. They "mattered," too. So did the war. America used to be like that.) If "nothing matters if we aren't safe," then everything is up for grabs if and when some lunatic decides to demonstrate that we're not. Marco Rubio wants to lead a fearful nation. Fine. Let him go find one.

Foxholes

Divine Irony:

↵ Reblogged from hemantmehta

Our Useless Cold-War Military

War ain't what it used to be, and neither is our military.  In The Nation, a veteran explains one reason why we can't win anymore.

While the old-fashioned, uniformed military guards its Cold War turf, preserved like some set of monstrous museum exhibits, the mutant military strives with great success to expand its power across the globe. Since 9/11, it's the mutant military that has gotten the lion’s share of the action and much of the adulation—here’s looking at you, SEAL Team 6—along with its ultimate enabler, the civilian commander-in-chief, now acting in essence as America’s assassin-in-chief.

Think of it this way: a quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military is completely uncontained. Washington’s foreign policies are strikingly military-first ones, and nothing seems to be out of bounds. Its two major parts, the Cold War-era “big” military, still very much alive and kicking, and the new-era military of special ops, contractors, and paramilitaries seek to dominate everything. Nuclear, conventional, unconventional, land, sea, air, space, cyber, you name it: all realms must be mastered.

Except it can’t master the one realm that matters most: itself. And it can’t find the one thing that such an uncontained military was supposed to guarantee: victory (not in a single place anywhere on Earth).

Loaded with loot and praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has no discipline and no direction. It never has to make truly tough choices, like getting rid of ICBMs or shedding its obscenely bloated top ranks of officers or cancelling redundant weapon systems like the F-35. It just aims to do it all, just about everywhere. As Nick Turse reported recently, U.S. special ops touched down in 150 countries between 2011 and 2014. And the results of all this activity have been remarkably repetitive and should by now be tragically predictable: lots of chaos spread, lots of casualties inflicted, and in every case, mission unaccomplished.

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be

Say what you will of the Cold War, at least it had an end. The overriding danger of the current American military moment is that it may lack one.

Once upon a time, the U.S. military was more or less tied to continental defense and limited by strong rivals in its hegemonic designs. No longer. Today, it has uncontained ambitions across the globe and even as it continually stumbles in achieving them, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or elsewhere, its growth is assured, as our leaders trip over one another in continuing to shower it with staggering sums of money and unconditional love.

No military should ever be trusted and no military should ever be left uncontained. Our nation’s founders knew this lesson. Five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower took pains in his farewell address in 1961 to remind us of it again. How did we as a people come to forget it? WTF, America?

What I do know is this: Take an uncontained, mutating military, sprinkle it with unconditional love and plenty of dough, and you have a recipe for disaster. So excuse me for being more than a little nervous about what we’ll all find when America flips the calendar by another quarter-century to the year 2040.

"Around the world, our men and women in uniform continue to serve and risk their lives. "

And shame on you for that, Mr. President.  End the Permanent War. Make this the last Memorial Day we have to remember new casualties.



Full transcript here.

Just Say No: to the Entire Middle East

Yes, the Iran deal is a huge accomplishment and should be an irrefutable proof that diplomacy works and war doesn't.

But the truth is that peace is not indigenous to the Middle East and has never thrived there. Even if our own repugs were not slavering for more permanent war.

Enough.

Kai Bird at The Nation:

Disengagement should now be our policy with both Israel and the Arab world. We Americans should urge our government to end all arms sales to any Arab nation ruled by a general, dictator or king. We need to isolate and diplomatically contain any Arab regime that has demonstrably killed unarmed protesters, as in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. We should also close our military installations in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.

Such a dramatic, categorical and evenhanded withdrawal of American arms and treasure would deal a bracing shock to the region’s ruling elites. But it would be a good and decent thing for all concerned. The so-called experts, our TV talking heads, will be quick to object that such a withdrawal would only open the gates to the barbaric head-choppers. These experts are wrong: the Salafist nihilists operating under the black flag of a farcical caliphate have bitter enemies all around them. They have no real future in the twenty-first century. And in any case, these sectarian wars are not ours—and our government has no business sacrificing young American men and women in such an ephemeral mission.

The experts will call disengagement quixotic. They will speak in Kissingeresque bass tones about America’s “strategic” interests in Arabian oil. But I don’t care about oil, a fungible commodity that will be sold in any event on the global market by any regime that controls such carbon resources—especially since, given our climate peril, we should be focusing on renewable and sustainable energy. And I don’t care about the “strategic” consequences: they cannot be worse than the Middle East we have mismanaged.

We Americans must have a lower profile in the Middle East. Of course we can provide humanitarian assistance. But the Arabs are weary of our shallow promises of security and democracy, and all our flaccid diplomatic efforts to sustain the “peace process” in reality seem only to sustain a dead-end status quo. Enough.

Dangerous as Hell

Digby: 

But the dreams of All American omnipotence and glory are hardwired into the right and very strong in the culture at large. And it's dangerous as hell. Everyone should want to negotiate peace as the default position. If there's anything on earth that should be avoided unless there is absolutely no other choice, it's war. You'd think that would be common sense but this rather silly belief in America's godlike military power is leading a whole lot of people to take us into some very dangerous territory.

Why Doesn't AynRandy Demand Saudi Arabia Fight Its Own Fucking Wars?

If the Tribble-Toupeed One is really the libertarian small-government champion he wants everyone to think he is, why is he so gung-ho for American soldiers to fight and die in the desert to save Saudi Arabia from the Islamic State the Saudis themselves created?

C'mon, Randy: you don't give a shit about how the Saudis treat the sub-humans sometimes known as "women." Your Dominionist buddies would do worse if they thought they could get away with it.

A boycott?  Of what?  The only economic connections the Saudis have with the U.S. are the oil they sell to us and the military hardware they buy.

Military hardware that sits in the desert and disintegrates from non-use because the Saudis don't fight their own wars; they get us to fight and die for them.

Boycotts won't change the Saudis; only being forced to fight their own fucking wars will do that.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called for a boycott of Saudi Arabia on Saturday, saying Americans should shun the kingdom as it did the apartheid regime in South Africa.

"Remember when South Africa was misbehaving? We organized a boycott of South Africa. We should be boycotting Saudi Arabia and not taking money from Saudi Arabia's government," Paul said.

At that time international sanctions were levied against the nation, along with a divestment campaign.

While the senator in his statements did not differentiate a government boycott from one by individuals, a spokesperson later said in a statement that Paul was "not calling for a governmental boycott, but rather options for private citizens and investors."

QOTD: War and Patriotism

Juan Cole at The Nation:

People who actually love the United States want to rescue it from foreign adventurism and improve the health and welfare of its people. They would want to discourage bigotry and black-and-white thinking, which makes war so much more thinkable. And they would eschew wars of aggression, a daisy chain that brings more wars in its wake.

Who's Afraid of a Lone Wolf?

Digby:

Terrorism carries a special brand of fear due to its political motivation.

But the "lone wolf" threat in the US? Considering the threat we live with from our fellow "lone wolf" citizens every day, even from political violence, it ridiculously hysterical. Nobody bats an eye at abortion clinics being targeted for years on end. A couple of right wing lunatics gunned down police officers in Las Vegas with a political beef a few months back and we didn't launch a national crusade against it. We can't even sustain any alarm at kids shooting up kids in schools for longer than a couple of days. We hardly even report it anymore it's so old hat. If there's one nation on earth that knows how to keep calm and carry on in the face of random armed misfits gunning down strangers it's us.

SNIP

From what I gather from the comments of various law enforcement officials and terrorism experts, the threat that concerns them is the Lone Wolf scenario. I'm sure it's very scary. But again, what makes it so much scarier than Adam Lanza or James Holmes or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold? I don't think anyone wants those kinds of killings but we haven't decided to turn ourselves into a full-blown police state to stop them. In fact, we have pretty much done nothing to stop them, even the smallest common sense measures like trying to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill kids. So all this handwringing over Muslim lone wolves seems just a bit over the top.

But it is very convenient and lucrative for certain politicians, news networks and military contractors, so there's that ...

American Sucker

We'll be rid of racism before we're rid of jingoism.

Rude Pundit:

American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.

SNIP

So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.

It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.

And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.

SNIP

We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us.  We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.

How Marxist, Feminist, Environmentalist Muslims Defeated IS

It's liberal democracy the way it was supposed to be, the one that plutocrats, corporations and freakazoids fear the most.

I expect U.S. drones to "accidentally" obliterate it any day now.

TPM:

Months after it was supposed to fall, Kobane still stands, and IS has been forced back. The story of the town’s resistance is an epic tale of determination and self-defense, and it’s one U.S. officials would rather not discuss. When the Pentagon claimed there were no ground troops in Kobane, they weren’t exactly telling the truth. In 2012, Syrian forces withdrew from three northern areas, leaving their administration and defense to the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Now the three territories hold more than four million people, half of them refugees from the Syrian civil war or the Islamic State’s advance, and many of them armed and organized. Kobane is one of the three territories that together constitute the autonomous region of Rojava, and it endures today because of the fiercely egalitarian society the people have built, the kind idealized by many leftists around the world.

Most Americans, even the ones who pay close attention to national involvement in the Middle East, have little to no idea about what has been happening in Kobane. The Pentagon has been less than forthcoming with support for these enemies of our enemies; their fighters are still on the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations. The American media has more or less ignored the political project in Rojava; they’ve been more comfortable painting Kurds as desperate fighters fending off the Islamic State. Besides, there are a lot of acronyms and complicated political affiliations to sort through. But while America isn’t watching, something incredible is happening. At the geographical nexus of so many of the world’s conflicts, a new post-national project is emerging.

SNIP

In 2005, his death sentence reduced to life in prison, Öcalan made a surprising announcement: He renounced nationalism. The PKK and its affiliates followed suit, dropping the fight for a seat at the UN and adopting a unique political ideology called democratic confederalism. When the Syrian government withdrew from what would be Rojava in 2012, they did not declare independence despite controlling the territory. Just when the world’s largest stateless group finally seems poised to join the modern nation state system, when the dream of a Kurdistan (if not a united one) in northern Iraq is nearly at hand, the PKK has abandoned its foundational agenda. What happened? The simplest answer is they thought of a better idea.

Despite being Turkey’s most notorious prisoner, Öcalan has kept in communication with his comrades (that’s what they call each other) through his writing, some of which has been translated for a western audience that has so far yet to appear. In a pamphlet on democratic confederalism, Öcalan laid out the premise for his unexpected turn:

So far, with a view to issues of ethnicity and nationhood like the Kurdish question, which have their roots deep in history and at the foundations of society, there seemed to be only one viable solution: the creation of a nation-state, which was the paradigm of the capitalist modernity at that time. We did not believe, however, that any ready-made political blueprints would be able to sustainably improve the situation of the people in the Middle East. Had it not been nationalism and nation-states which had created so many problems in the Middle East?

The Kurdish freedom struggle, he explains, had always been about “liberating the society and democratizing it” and resisting “the global domination of the modern capitalist system.” Inspired by decolonization struggles throughout the global south, the PKK’s founders followed their model, attempting a Maoist guerrilla war strategy to establish their own nation. They were always a little behind the times; by the PKK’s founding in 1978, the Cold War period of national liberation had drawn to a close. Even if, against all odds, they were to win, the most likely outcome would be a Cuba-style trade embargo enforced by Turkey. The organization needed a new vision, and democratic confederalism was Öcalan’s answer.

At the geographical nexus of so many of the world’s conflicts, a new post-national project is emerging.

 

So what is democratic confederalism? Öcalan calls it “a non-state political administration” or a “democracy without a state.” Instead of centralizing political power in a government, confederalism views society holistically, as an association of associations of intrinsically social people. It aspires to flatten the divisions the state places between public, productive and domestic life, linking together sewing cooperatives, neighborhood communes, refugee assistance groups, schools and self-defense forces in a common framework. The higher levels of organization exist to facilitate the grassroots, and decisions flow from the bottom to the top. It’s designed to work without, beneath, between and against nation-states, depending on the situation. Like the Islamic State, democratic confederalism does not recognize borders except as obstacles to overcome. “It is flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented,” Öcalan writes. “Ecology and feminism are central pillars.”

"But the end of a war is just the beginning of our obligations to those who serve in our name"

The best thing we can do for veterans is to get out of the warmaking business, Mr. President.



Full transcript here.

All the Repugs Have Is Fear. Unfortunately, It Works

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

Whether it's Ebola, the IRS, ISIS, Benghazi! or the recent Secret Service scandal, Republicans are dedicated to convincing voters they live in a dark, horrible world. Be afraid, little people, be afraid.

The corollary to that is, of course, that the good soldier Republicans will save you if you'll only vote for them so they can roll back time to some time in history (God knows when!) when everything was wonderful.

It's a tactic. Fear as motivation to reject progress is time-honored and Republicans have turned it into a sort of art form -- dark arts, that is. After all, one of the reasons we live in a somewhat scary world is because of what Republicans did; specifically, Republicans George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

SNIP

Fear and anger. Fear and bigotry. Fear and selfishness. Classic conservative tactics and monsters of conservative invention for the purely cynical purpose of gaining and consolidating power.

For example, the Ebola virus. President Obama has wisely decided that deploying our military expertise to build medical facilities and help put some infrastructure in Africa to combat the disease is a good thing. But David Vitter objects, claiming it focuses too much on Africa. No funding for efforts to contain the virus and save lives in Africa, Vitter whines, while clutching his pearls and crying about "illegals" crossing the southern border with unnamed but intentional linkage to the Ebola virus. Be afraid!

Fear, baby. It sells. Give them some fear, forget that you refuse to deal with the situation causing the fear.

Nuke Saudi Arabia. Do It Now.

Steve M. says President Obama will probably send ground troops to the Syria/Iraq Permanent Hellhole of Futility after the election.

I think he's right, and I think the only way to stop it is to turn the real trouble-maker in the region into a giant sheet of glass.

I mean it. There is no reason not to and and infinite number of reasons to do it.

Revenge for 9-11, three-quarters of the terrorists of which came from Saudia Arabia?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Shut off the money flow to Islamic terrorists worldwide?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Punch the fossil fuel industry in the nuts, maybe long enough to get renewable energy really off and running?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Eliminate the economic, social and religious source of the 9th-century backward bullshit that enslaves a billion women and children around the world?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Kevin Drum:

I don't think the world has a Muslim problem. It has a Saudi Arabia problem. The closer a country is to the warped influence of Saudi Arabia, the more violent and illiberal it is. Go west to Tunisia and Morocco and Islam becomes more moderate. Go north to Turkey and it becomes more moderate. Go east to India and Indonesia and it becomes more moderate.

Obviously this is hardly a perfect correlation. If you want to find exceptions, you can. But generally speaking, Saudi Arabia is the epicenter of Islam's problems, a country that stands for virtually everything that the liberal West condemns. It is almost feudally anti-democratic. It is corrupt. It is theocratic. It treats women and gays horribly. Its legal system is barbarous. It is intolerant of any religion other than its own fundamentalist strain of Wahabi Islam. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and the rest came from nearby countries. Saudi Arabia is a country that, by rights, should be shunned by every government on the planet.

But they're not. For historical reasons, we've instead forged a longtime alliance with the princes of Riyadh. The world is paying a high price for this.

QOTD: Useless Air Strikes

Kevin Drum:

But guess what? The Iraqi army is still incompetent. America's allies still have their own agendas and don't care about ours. Air campaigns still aren't enough on their own to stop a concerted ground attack. This is the way things are. There are no magic wands. If you want quick results against ISIS, then speak up and tell us you want to send in 100,000 troops. If you're not willing to do that, then you have to accept that lots of innocent people are going to die without the United States being able to offer much help. Make your choice now.

Priorities

From Firedoglake:

- Juan Cole: “Congress Cut $8.7 Billion in Food Stamps in Same Year We’ll Spend $22 Billion to Fight Islamic State”