The True State of the Union: A House Divided, Enslaved & Mired in the Mistakes of the Past

by JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

John W. Whitehead is the president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

Photo by A Yee | CC BY 2.0

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

—Abraham Lincoln

History has a funny way of circling back on itself.

The facts, figures, faces and technology may change from era to era, but the dangers remain the same.

This year is no different, whatever the politicians and talking heads may say to the contrary.

Sure, there’s a new guy in charge with a talent for stirring up mayhem and madness, but for the most part, we’re still recycling the same news stories that have kept us with one eye warily glued to the news for the past 100-odd years: War. Corruption. Brutality. Economic instability. Partisan politics. Militarism. Disease. Hunger. Greed. Violence. Poverty. Ignorance. Hatred.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Brush up on your history, and you’ll find that we’ve been stuck on repeat for some time now.

Take the United States of America in the year 2018, which is not so far different from the United States of America during the Civil Rights era, or the Cold War era, or even the Depression era.

Go far enough afield, and you’ll find aspects of our troubled history mirrored in the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, in the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, and further back in the militarism of the Roman Empire.

We’re like TV weatherman Phil Connors in Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, forced to live the same day over and over again.

Here in the American police state, however, we continue to wake up, hoping this new day, new president and new year will somehow be different from what has come before.

Unfortunately, no matter how we change the narrative, change the characters, change the plot lines, we seem to keep ending up in the same place that we started: enslaved, divided and repeating the mistakes of the past.

You want to know about the true State of our Union? Listen up.

The State of the Union: The state of our union is politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, Americans have found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.

The predators of the police state have wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government has not listened to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as the source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—remain armed to the teeth and act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies continue to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spy on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors make a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

Consequently, the state of our nation has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. The policies of the American police state have continued unabated.

The Executive Branch: 

All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump.

Trump has these powers because every successive occupant of the Oval Office has been allowed to expand the reach and power of the presidency through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements that can be activated by any sitting president. Those of us who saw this eventuality coming have been warning for years about the growing danger of the Executive Branch with its presidential toolbox of terror that could be used—and abused—by future presidents. The groundwork, we warned, was being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the president—or whoever happens to be occupying the Oval Office at the time—thinks. And if he or she thinks you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides. In effect, you will disappear.

Our warnings went unheeded.

The Legislative Branch:  Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office runs the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 84 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests. The courts have empowered the government to wreak havoc on our liberties. Protections for private property continue to be undermined. And Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.

Shadow Government: Donald Trump inherited more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he assumed office. He also inherited a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. As a result, police are becoming even more militarized and weaponized, and police shootings of unarmed individuals continue to increase.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. Black budget spending has completely undermined any hope of fiscal transparency, with government contractors padding their pockets at the expense of taxpayers and the nation’s infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—taking the hit. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countriesaround the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

So how do we go about reclaiming our freedoms and reining in our runaway government?

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department.

In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them.

In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of politicians, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today.

What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state.

In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age: the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

As long as we continue to put our politics ahead of our principles—moral, legal and constitutional—“we the people” will lose.

And you know who will keep winning by playing on our prejudices, capitalizing on our fears, deepening our distrust of our fellow citizens, and dividing us into polarized, warring camps incapable of finding consensus on the one true menace that is an immediate threat to all of our freedoms? The government.

When we lose sight of the true purpose of government—to protect our rights—and fail to keep the government in its place as our servant, we allow the government to overstep its bounds and become a tyrant that rules by brute force.

Rule by brute force.

That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our republic.

The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly: SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Citizens being jailed for growing vegetable gardens in their front yards and holding prayer services in their backyards. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.

Brace yourselves. We are approaching critical mass.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/31/the-true-state-of-the-union-a-house-divided-enslaved-mired-in-the-mistakes-of-the-past/

U.S – War Dog Wants To Bite, But What And How?

in Imperialism — by Andre Vltchek —

It could be truly comical, if it were not to be so dangerous for millions of people living all over the world. The Empire, once mighty, ruthless and frightening is now jumping around like a dog infected with rabies; it is salivating, barking loudly, its tail is stiff between its legs.

It snaps left and right, and periodically it is even trying to bite a piece of Moon off. But the Moon is far, too far, even for the best armed and the most aggressive country on Earth.

Iran is much closer, and so are North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Russia, China, Pakistan and other nations that have managed to land themselves on that proverbial shit list of the neo-colonialist World Order,manufactured by the West.

The General Manager of what the West likes to define as the “Free World”, is increasingly behaving like a hooligan and racist, insulting African countries which havesurvived both genocide and the slave trade, and which have been, for centuries, colonized, plundered and enslaved first by various European ‘enlightened’ states, and later by the coordinated efforts of the Western governments and multi-national corporations.

He is also offending and intimidating millions of Latin Americans; people of the Western Hemisphere who have been, for ages, falling under the infamous ‘Monroe Doctrine’ of U.S. foreign policy. The summary of that Doctrine has been basically this: do as we say and what is in the interests of the West, or we’ll overthrow your governments, murder your leaders or even directly invade your shores. Now ‘illegal immigrants’ from these countries are most likely going to have to leave the United States. Because they are poor (logically they are, after centuries of oppression and terror from the North), because they are not white, and because they are ‘uneducated’, or in summary, because they are not ‘Norwegians’ (the Manager would prefer Norwegian migrants).

Insulting people and nations is one thing, but bringing the world near a nuclear war is something quite different.

Increasingly it appears that the possibility of a new and horrid conflict (or conflicts) is nothing hypothetical. It is an absolutely realistic scenario, a great possibility, considering both the state of mind of the Manager, and even, progressively,the state of mind of the Western public, who seem to be totally out of touch with their position in the world and even with their own history.

In the meantime, a gruesome war dog is jumping all over, pointing in different directions, ready to bite, to devour, to bring to an end life itself on our Planet.

Who will be its first victim?

Is anyone ready to yield to a brutal force, to surrender out of fear, to accept the morbid, repulsive fate of conquered and broken nations like Afghanistan, Libya or Iraq?

Would any government be so insane as to allow the West to ‘liberate’ its people?

I don’t think so; not anymore. All the examples are just too horrid. It is better to fight a war, to fight for one’s freedom, than to become a colony, a broken, humiliated and usurped land. I saw what they have done to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to the Democratic Republic of Congo. I saw and I wanted to puke from what I witnessed, but instead wrote an 800-page accusation, from all over the world, called“Exposing Lies Of The Empire”.

The West has already run out of credit. There is no trust in it left. The entire world knows perfectly well what it is like to be colonized and controlled by both Europe and the United States.

The dog of war is searching for some weak point, where its fangs can begin tearing flesh apart. But suddenly, it seems that there is none. All points are hardened, tough.

Russia and China are standing firm and tall, their diplomats literally humiliating their counterparts from Western Empire bycomposed, powerfully sophisticated and refinedbehavior. But the militaries of both peaceful but mighty nationshaverecently been on constant alert: ready to defend their own people, and humanity.

Iran and North Korea are not yielding either. Syria is beginning to rebuild, despite the fact that the subversion, armed and supported from abroad,has not yet been fully defeated. Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia are still there, standing upright, definitely not on their knees.

Suddenly, no one is ready to surrender. This is the first time in history that the Empire has faced such scorn from the rest of the world.

The more solid is determination of various countries not to allow themselves to get colonized, the more insane is the St. Vitus Dance of the West becomes.

The unwillingness to lose great privileges as well as the ‘ruling position’ of the world(including the ‘right’ to tell the rest of the world what is ‘correct’ and what is not) is also clearly embedded in the positions of various European and North American pseudo-left-wing publications, movements and parties: they were always ready to shed tears over the fate of the poor and oppressed people anywhere in the world, or ‘fight against war/for peace’, but they have been greatly allergic to those non-white nations that have been bravely proclaiming their right to march on their own path, or practically: to choose their own political and economic systems, as well as their way of life.

Imperialism, chauvinism and the cultural superiority complexes of the West have many different forms and shades.Almost no individual there is immune to these ills, if one doesn’t count those very few pure men and women who could be defined as internationalists. There are some of them even in the U.S., in the U.K. or France, but not many; not many at all.

In the past, those countries that were on the hit list of the Empire could only count on themselves. Lately, this has changed dramatically: now they can also count on each other.

And that is why the Empire is going to lose! There is already a global coalition against its terror. It is still forming and defining itself, but it is already strong.

The Empire knows that it will lose; it knows it intuitively, but it is still in denial.

It may still ruin dozens of millions of human lives, before it is over. Most likely, it will. But the era of darkness, of those monstrous centuries of colonialism, will soon be ended.

*

The citizens of the West should finally think about their own history. They should do some serious learning, educating themselves. Most of them are fully ignorant, including those holding various degrees. What have their countries done to Russia, to China, to Iran to Korea, in fact to the entire Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and to what is now called Latin America?

The atrocious history of the West is flowing into present, and if the course is not dramatically changed, it will keep flowing into the future.

Accumulatively, we are talking about hundreds of millions of human lives destroyed by the West throughout its colonialist and imperialist reign. Some statisticians are already talking about 1 billion.

This cannot be taken back, but the trend can be stopped.

The West has absolutely zero moral mandate to tell any country of the world how to behave. The world, despite the systematic brainwashing, is beginning to realize it.

If the West continues to bully its former and present victims, things will only backfire.

Europe, North America and their allies (partners in crime) should simply sit on their backsides, weep and throw ashes on their heads, in shame and grieve over the horrors they put our planet through, for several centuries.

Instead the West is running around, barking, showing fangs, shitting itself out of fear that it may lose its control over the world and could finally be forced to play by the international rules.

It doesn’t even occur to it that it should, instead, get quickly admitted to a mental institution for particularly violent and sadistic patients.

Its Manager is not an anomaly. He was put there, ‘where he is’, by the people. Many of his dreams and desires are identical to those of the masses.

In the West, he is not the first Manager of this sort, and he is not the worst. He is part of that long tradition of tyrants. And this tradition has to stop, very soon, in order for our Planet to survive.

These are brutal, dangerous and testing times. The ill, aggressive monster should not be allowed to totally destroy the world. Those who are already standing, should never surrender.Others should join. The survival of our civilization is at stake!

*

[First published by NEO]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

https://countercurrents.org/2018/01/31/u-s-war-dog-wants-bite/

The My Lai Massacre: Fifty Years Later

by HOWARD LISNOFF

Photo by -JvL- | CC BY 2.0

Nineteen sixty-eight was an earth-shattering year! Revolution was in the air all across the globe from nations in Europe to Mexico, the U.S., and beyond. Living in revolutionary times was exhilarating, especially when seen against the backdrop of the fascistic systems of government and politics that have grown across the world today.

There were the assassinations of King and Kennedy. There was the bloody Democratic convention in Chicago with its police riot and the nomination of the staid Hubert Humphrey who could not get out of his own way in terms of criticizing Lyndon Johnson about the quagmire that was Vietnam. There were the peace candidates who went down to defeat. And then there was Nixon who kept the Vietnam War going for his entire presidency with its attendant unending barbarism.

And there was the massacre at My Lai and its coverup that made its way into the national consciousness by eyewitness testimony. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story at the national level in a cable published by the Dispatch News Service on November 12, 1969.  The pervasive grotesque nature of the Vietnam War had become a mainstay on the nightly news and in the consciousness of those willing to listen.

For those who may need a quick primer in the history of the area near the central coast of South Vietnam, the villages that made up My Lai were referred to as “pinkville” because of the color of the rice paddies in the area near the sea. The villages were attacked by a unit of the U.S. Army’s Americal Division in a company lead by Lt. William Calley. Over 500 unarmed men, women, and children were ruthlessly murdered as a purported get back for an earlier attack that killed members of that U.S. Army unit.

Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim present the history of My Lai in the book Four Hours in My Lai.

What is remarkable about the massacre of My Lai was that it was not a solitary event, but rather it reflected the ongoing vicious and murderous violations of international law and U.S. law that was and is encoded in the Geneva Conventions. Specifically, it is against the rules of war to murder civilian noncombatants. My Lai made a travesty of those laws in the testimony of witnesses and the photographic record of the masses of unarmed civilians laying dead in ditches and along the road. Many on the domestic front did not see the murder of mothers with babies in their arms as having anything to do with the battle against communism, even if that was the reasoning of such brutal carnage. Very few babies read Marx. The labels of “gook” and “Charlie” were the racist names given to the Vietnamese people to dehumanize them. The theft of national treasure from human needs to war was highlighted when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic March 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City.

Often those who wished to report atrocities in Vietnam were threatened by fellow soldiers or officers. Some soldiers refused to take part in mass murder. Others intervened to stop it.

I had returned from basic and advanced training in the military only six months before the killings at My Lai were reported. Having seen the grotesqueness of military training during the Vietnam War, I was well on my way to becoming a war resister. Tens of thousands of others would take the same route. Only the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State in May 1970 awaited to cement the loathing of all things having to do with war.

Many wanted to believe that the massacre at My Lai was the aberrant act of a few… a few bad apples.  But in “Civilian Killings Went Unpunished,” (Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2006) Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson document beyond any level of doubt that the military and the government’s own records show that a cohort of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam perpetrated massacres that included the involvement of every single division of the military. This lethal bloodletting was carried out by a minority in the military, but these incidents of mass murder in varying degrees went on during the course of the war. The enemy body counts demanded by commanders were not enough to explain away mass murder and neither was the bogeyman of anticommunism.

The files that the Times’ reporters unearthed were “part of a once-secret archive” that showed 320 alleged incidents, excluding My Lai, that “were substantiated by Army investigators.” Indeed, the Winter Soldier Investigation testimony given in 1971 in Detroit, organized by the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, can be viewed as corroborating these official charges. And these attacks against unarmed civilians “were not confined to a few rogue units.”

By the time of the U.S. campus massacres, the Vietnam War was viewed unfavorably by most in the U.S. who were polled, but so was the antiwar movement. The vast majority of protest, however, was peaceful.

As the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre approaches on March 16, 2018, it might be sobering to recall that lethal mayhem against the innocent always accompanies war. September 2001 proved the latter. Does it matter that thousands were killed because by sanctions against Iraq in decades past, or that the World Health Organization reported in 2017 that 500,000 people were suffering from cholera in the U.S. backed, Saudi led, war in Yemen?  The Independent reported that by 2017, more than five million people had fled the civil war in Syria. That’s just one war and the reception of those fleeing refugees is the subject of an international scandal with a pittance of those fleeing reaching the U.S., a nation that had called for regime change in Syria and maintains a troop presence there now.

Ronald Reagan sought to cast the Vietnam War in a positive light when he labelled it a “noble cause” speaking before a veterans’ group during the 1980 presidential campaign. Those who care about the claims of history and want to maintain a sense of humanity know that Reagan was nothing more than an actor that day. He wanted to get the people ready for new wars!

Because the adage that the personal is political is something of value learned from the decade of the 1960s and early 1970s, many have remained involved politically and also involved in protest. I know four veterans from the Vietnam era in the area where I live. Three are Vietnam veterans and the fourth was a war resister. One veteran has told me that while he had come to see the war as wrong, he wished he could have stood at the Canadian border and shot at war resisters. That veteran had suffered the ravages of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange. The second veteran repaired helicopters in Vietnam and is active in veterans affairs. The third veteran is a successful attorney whom I overheard at a political meeting tell people that he had killed children while in combat in Vietnam. The last veteran I know was in the National Guard and went AWOL from a special forces training unit when others in the unit threatened to kill him. He traded his Ford Mustang for his life and was discharged honorably after he returned to the military. His story rings true since an army buddy and other Guardsmen and Reservists were viciously attacked and their military clothing and boots were destroyed while in advanced training at a base in Georgia where I had trained during the Vietnam War era.

Fifty years after My Lai the bloodletting continues and lessons learned from the atrocities there were soon lost in the fog of war. The paramount importance of the laws of war were also jettisoned in that fog.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/30/the-my-lai-massacre-fifty-years-later/

Pipeline Wars: Realpolitik Meets Geography

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 30.01.2018

Tom LUONGO

The headlines are ablaze this month with news from all over about new pipeline projects coming into Europe.  Never one to miss an opportunity to do the U.S. State Department’s bidding in how it presents pipeline politics, Oilprice.com published a howler of a piece about the Southern Gas Corridor.

Titled, “Is This the World’s Most Critical Pipeline?” the piece is pure marketing fluff designed to make you think that Azerbaijani gas will change the face of European gas politics.

The beginning is the most telling, “Europe wants to become less dependent on Russian gas and use more clean energy…” This is a lie.

Europe doesn’t want this as a continent, the leaders of the European Union who are aligned with the United States who view Russia as the enemy want to become less dependent on Russian gas.

Most of Europe wants Russia to supply them with natural gas because it is 1) cheap and 2) plentiful.  For geopolitical reasons the U.S. doesn’t want an ascendant Russia.  The EU technocracy agrees because a strong Russia owning more than 40% of European gas sales is a Russia that can’t be destabilized through currency and proxy wars.

Southern Gas Boondoggle

The Southern Gas Corridor is a nearly 4000km (2500 mile) gas pipeline project to bring Caspian Sea natural gas into southern Europe.  It is slated, when completed with all the side projects tying into it, between 60 and 120 billion cubic meters of gas annually (bcma) starting with an unknown amount from Azerbaijan in 2019.

That number comes from an announcement in the Financial Times circa 2008.  A better number for it is closer to just 16 bcma.

It’s estimated cost at the time of negotiation was over $41 billion.  Today, it’s $45 billion with corruption and graft likely to take that number higher.  This is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem.  It is nothing more than a $45 billion bribe to both the U.S.-favorable regime in Azerbaijan and BP who is sitting on the major Shah Deniz gas deposit with out a market to sell it to.

The U.S has been using EU countries hostile to Russia, namely the Baltics and Poland, to delay or scuttle new Russian gas projects into Europe; projects that countries like Italy, Greece and Bulgaria are screaming for.

The Real Southern Gas Route

In 2014 political pressure on Bulgaria from the EU and the U.S. scuttled the South Stream pipeline from Russia.  South Stream was to bring gas from Russia’s southern fields across the Black Sea into Bulgaria, who would have profited nicely from the billions in transit fees annually.

Since the South Stream debacle, Bulgaria has had a change in government. The people got rid of the U.S. satrap government and installed one much more hostile to geopolitical games which keep them poor.

Putin and Gazprom, the state gas company behind South Stream, quickly shifted gears and announced a re-route of it through Turkey.  The new project is called Turkish Stream and will terminate in Greece.  Hungary negotiated a spur off of Turkish Stream with Gazprom last summer.   The intervening countries all want the transit fees.

The European Union has not signed off on Turkish Stream legs inside the EU, but the first leg which will bring 15.75 bcma to Turkey will be completed this year and that gas will be used by Turkey to strengthen its relationship with Russia.

The cost for this project? Just $12 billion.  And it goes under the Black Sea.

The Nord Stream 2 Gorillia in the Room

Then let’s turn our attention to the very controversial NordStream 2 pipeline.  This is the one that would double the capacity of the existing Nordstream pipeline bringing cheap Russian gas from basically St. Petersburg to Germany.

It brings 55 bmca a year to the EU as I write this.  Nordstream 2 would double that.  It’s only 780 miles long. It will be finished by next year.

The price tag? Just under $10 billion.

And Gazprom bent over backwards to make this a European-owned project, partnering with no less than five European oil and gas majors to own half of the project.  Poland stepped in and declared the joint venture illegal and Gazprom had to go it alone.  Eventually it worked out a deal where its former partners became its financiers by getting loans directly from them to build the pipeline.  The loans were for the same amount of money they were initially going to put into the joint-venture.

The EU has done everything to stop Nordstream 2 short of simply writing a law outlawing it, which it cannot do.  And it finally threw in the towel earlier in the month.

The European Commission antitrust enquiry is effectively retracted from the DG Comp’s agenda after Gazprom agreed not to object to cross-border sales of resold Russian gas and make destination clauses flexible.

The EU legal service’s legal opinion on the applicability of the Third Gas Package to an offshore pipeline Nord Stream 2 (it found it was not) all but buried any future European Commission aspirations to block the project. The European Council chief, Donald Tusk, keeps on urging member states to adopt new EU gas rules which would specifically target maritime gas pipelines feeding the EU, however, Germany and France seem highly reluctant to go along with it.

Tusk is a Polish EU-Firster and Russophobe par excellence.  He’s also one of the most odious men in the EU hierarchy, and that’s saying something considering the company he keeps there.

The EU changed the rules during the lead up to South Stream as well, implementing new rules for pipeline ownership ex post facto of the contracts being signed and the permits issued. This is what made it easy for Bulgaria to scuttle the project.

Again, all to satisfy a United States hell-bent on keeping Russia bottled up and maintaining political control over the EU.

Politics Over People

What’s important in all of this is the massive effects that power politics plays on the economic welfare of people.  Politicians, generals, CEOs of corporatist nightmares don’t make decisions in the best interest of the people they are supposed to serve.  They make them in the interest of policy goals that more often than not do little more than waste precious capital on boondoggles like the Southern Gas Corridor project.

That project has been the goal of EU and U.S. politicians for more than a decade.  It has required an unbelievable amount of political maneuvering to get off the ground. And the final product will be less than twenty percent of its original capacity.

On the other hand, with Putin cancelling South Stream in 2014, he moved quickly on the two projects highlighted here which will be operational despite the roadblocks before the Southern Gas Corridor will be.

The goal of diversifying Europe’s gas purchases is one born of politics not energy safety.  The immense trade benefits that Russia gains from these pipelines are not things they will jeopardize over a single missed payment.

Energy security is simply a fear-mongering tool to mask banal corruption and articles like the Oilprice.com one that inspired this response are simply cheap forms of propaganda.

Europe’s future is more secure with Turkish Stream and Nordstream 2 providing the people of Europe gas at half the price of Caspian gas.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Ukraine, who for three plus years have been buying re-sold Russian gas at twice the price from Germany and Poland to avoid buying it directly from Gazprom.  Schools and businesses have had to shut down simply because they don’t have the money to heat the buildings.

With this year’s frigid winter, they’ve finally relented and will begin buying gas directly Gazprom again, now that their legal challenge was settled by the Stockholm Arbitration Court.

This is what is driving European politics populist.  It, along with insane immigration, is eroding the political power of the globalists who run the EU.  Gazprom, despite all of the rhetoric, supplied a record amount of gas to Europe in 2017 and will likely increase those deliveries by another 6% in 2018.

Eventually economic reality overwhelms realpolitik.

tomluongo.me

Tags: Gazprom  Nord Stream  South Stream  TANAP  Turkish Stream 

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/01/30/pipeline-wars-realpolitik-meets-geography.html

The War That Never Ends (for the U.S. Military High Command)

By Danny Sjursen 

Source: TomDispatch.com 

Posted in: Foreign Policy, US, War and Peace, History | No comments

Vietnam: it’s always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.

A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command.  And almost half a century later, they’re still losing it and blaming others for doing so.

Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the previous century and perhaps it’s well that they did.  The United States really had no business intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy, and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides of that country’s artificial border.  In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans in those years as the Vietcong.

More than two decades of involvement and, at the war’s peak, half a million American troops never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.  Despite millions of Asian deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam’s military could not, in the end, hold the line without American support and finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion in April 1975.

There’s just one thing.  Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the “orthodox” school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior American military officers do not.  Instead, they’re still refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier outcome through the books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East.

The Big Re-Write

In 1986, future general, Iraq-Afghan War commander, and CIA director David Petraeus penned an article for the military journal Parameters that summarized his Princeton doctoral dissertation on the Vietnam War.  It was a piece commensurate with then-Major Petraeus’s impressive intellect, except for its disastrous conclusions on the lessons of that war.  Though he did observe that Vietnam had “cost the military dearly” and that “the frustrations of Vietnam are deeply etched in the minds of those who lead the services,” his real fear was that the war had left the military unprepared to wage what were then called “low-intensity conflicts” and are now known as counterinsurgencies.  His takeaway: what the country needed wasn’t less Vietnams but better-fought ones.  The next time, he concluded fatefully, the military should do a far better job of implementing counterinsurgency forces, equipment, tactics, and doctrine to win such wars.

Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in Iraq, he and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers devoted to his favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very conclusions to win the war on terror.  The names of some of them — H.R. McMaster and James Mattis, for instance — should ring a bell or two these days. In Iraq and later in Afghanistan, Petraeus and his acolytes would get their chance to translate theory into practice.  Americans — and much of the rest of the planet — still live with the results.

Like Petraeus, an entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years after the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that ancient conflict.  After all these decades, such “thinking” generals and “soldier-scholars” continue to draw all the wrong lessons from what, thanks in part to them, has now become America’s second longest war.

Rival Schools

Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking.  There are the “Clausewitzians” (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam.  Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the “hearts-and-minders.”  As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy — everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam.

The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century.  Senior commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have translated that conflict’s supposed lessons into what now passes for military strategy in Washington.  The result has been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia to West Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the can-do belief that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can work now.

The Go-Big Option

The leading voice of the Clausewitzian school was U.S. Army Colonel and Korean War/Vietnam War vet Harry Summers, whose 1982 book, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, became an instant classic within the military.  It’s easy enough to understand why.  Summers argued that civilian policymakers — not the military rank-and-file — had lost the war by focusing hopelessly on the insurgency in South Vietnam rather than on the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.  More troops, more aggressiveness, even full-scale invasions of communist safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, would have led to victory.

Summers had a deep emotional investment in his topic.  Later, he would argue that the source of post-war pessimistic analyses of the conflict lay in “draft dodgers and war evaders still [struggling] with their consciences.”  In his own work, Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians), failed to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts of escalation he advocated, and didn’t even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national security interest of the United States.

Perhaps he would have done well to reconsider a famous post-war encounter he had with a North Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Tu, whom he assured that “you know you never beat us on the battlefield.”

“That may be so,” replied his former enemy, “but it is also irrelevant.”

Whatever its limitations, his work remains influential in military circles to this day. (I was assigned the book as a West Point cadet!)

A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty.  He argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were derelict in failing to give President Lyndon Johnson an honest appraisal of what it would take to win, which meant that “the nation went to war without the benefit of effective military advice.”  He concluded that the war was lost not in the field or by the media or even on antiwar college campuses, but in Washington, D.C., through a failure of nerve by the Pentagon’s generals, which led civilian officials to opt for a deficient strategy.

McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy — a full ground invasion of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country.  In this sense, he was just another “go-big” Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed outrecently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge — an observation of historian Edward Miller — that “the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war.”

COIN: A Small (Forever) War

Another Vietnam veteran, retired Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, fired the opening salvo for the hearts-and-minders.  In The Army and Vietnam, published in 1986, he argued that the NLF, not the North Vietnamese Army, was the enemy’s chief center of gravity and that the American military’s failure to emphasize counterinsurgency principles over conventional concepts of war sealed its fate.  While such arguments were, in reality, no more impressive than those of the Clausewitzians, they have remained popular with military audiences, as historian Dale Andrade points out, because they offer a “simple explanation for the defeat in Vietnam.”

Krepinevich would write an influential 2005 Foreign Affairs piece, “How to Win in Iraq,” in which he applied his Vietnam conclusions to a new strategy of prolonged counterinsurgency in the Middle East, quickly winning over the New York Times’s resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, and generating “discussion in the Pentagon, CIA, American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president.”

In 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.  Sorley boldly assertedthat, by the spring of 1970, “the fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won.”  According to his comforting tale, the real explanation for failure lay with the “big-war” strategy of U.S. commander General William Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor, General Creighton Abrams — Sorley’s knight in shining armor — was (or at least should have been) a war winner.

Critics noted that Sorley overemphasized the marginal differences between the two generals’ strategies and produced a remarkably counterfactual work.  It didn’t matter, however.  By 2005, just as the situation in Iraq, a country then locked in a sectarian civil war amid an American occupation, went from bad to worse, Sorley’s book found its way into the hands of the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, and State Department counselor Philip Zelikow.  By then, according to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, it could also “be found on the bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad.”

Another influential hearts-and-minds devotee was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl.  (He even made it onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.) His Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnamfollowed Krepinevich in claiming that “if [Creighton] Abrams had gotten the call to lead the American effort at the start of the war, America might very well have won it.”  In 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker “so liked [Nagl’s] book that he made it required reading for all four-star generals,” while the Iraq War commander of that moment, General George Casey, gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a copy during a visit to Baghdad.

David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of FM 3-24, the first (New York Times-reviewed) military field manual for counterinsurgency since Vietnam, must also be considered among the pantheon of hearts-and-minders.  Nagl wrote a foreword for their manual, while Krepinevich provided a glowing back-cover endorsement.

Such revisionist interpretations would prove tragic in Iraq and Afghanistan, once they had filtered down to the entire officer corps.

Reading All the Wrong Books 

In 2009, when former West Point history professor Colonel Gregory Daddis was deployed to Iraq as the command historian for the Multinational Corps — the military’s primary tactical headquarters — he noted that corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Jacoby had assigned a professional reading list to his principal subordinates.  To his disappointment, Daddis also discovered that the only Vietnam War book included was Sorley’s A Better War.  This should have surprised no one, since his argument — that American soldiers in Vietnam weredenied an impending victory by civilian policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors — was still resonant among the officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire.  It wasn’t the military’s fault!

Officers have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual guideposts to the complex challenges ahead.  Indeed, there’s much to be admired in the concept, but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of an entire generation of future leaders.  In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious.  The generals have been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were essentially meant to reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful and unending wars.

Just after 9/11, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers — who spoke at my West Point graduation — included Summers’s On Strategy on his list.  A few years later, then-Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker added McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty.  The trend continues today.  Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller has kept McMaster and added Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (he of the illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia and war criminal fame).  Current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley kept Kissinger and added good old Lewis Sorley.  To top it all off, Secretary of Defense Mattis has included yet another Kissinger book and, in a different list, Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam.

Just as important as which books made the lists is what’s missing from them: none of these senior commanders include newer scholarship, novels, or journalistic accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices that might highlight the limits of American influence and power.

Serving in the Shadow of Vietnam 

Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War.  They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in 1974, future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976, and present National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in 1984.  Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in 1971, while Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his commission in 1976.

In other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war on terror entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in Southeast Asia.  That meant they narrowly escaped combat duty in the bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so the professional credibility that went with it.  They were mentored and taught by academy tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on that conflict.  Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era — and it’s never ended.

Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding.  And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that — on civilians in Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.   

From Vietnam to the War on Terror to Generational War

All of this misremembering, all of those Vietnam “lessons” inform the U.S. military’s ongoing “surges” and “advise-and-assist” approaches to its wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Representatives of both Vietnam revisionist schools now guide the development of the Trump administration’s version of global strategy. President Trump’s in-house Clausewitzians clamor for — and receive — ever more delegated authority to do their damnedest and what retired General (and Vietnam vet) Edward Meyer called for back in 1983: “a freer hand in waging war than they had in Vietnam.” In other words, more bombs, more troops, and carte blanche to escalate such conflicts to their hearts’ content.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world’s nations.  Furthermore, they’ve recently fought for and been granted a new “mini-surge” in Afghanistan intended to — in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language — “break the deadlock,” “reverse the decline,” and “end the stalemate” there.  Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, “stabilize” Afghanistan.  The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced Trump that — despite his original instincts — 4,000 or 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more drones, planes, and other equipment) will do the trick.  This represents tragedy bordering on farce.

The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting.  None of today’s acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington couldn’t have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who flew 269 combat missions over that country) noted in the recent Ken Burns documentary series, “we were fighting on the wrong side.”

Today’s leaders don’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end.  In an interview last June, Petraeus — still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment — disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as “generational.”  Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down.  Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) — a process known then as “Vietnamization” — the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support “would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.”  Vietnam, too, had its “generational” side (until, of course, it didn’t).

That war and its ill-fated lessons will undoubtedly continue to influence U.S. commanders until a new set of myths, explaining away a new set of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, take over, possibly thanks to books by veterans of these conflicts about how Washington could have won the war on terror.

It’s not that our generals don’t read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the wrong books.

In 1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parameters article with a quote from historian George Herring: “Each historical situation is unique and the use of analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous.”  When it comes to Vietnam and a cohort of officers shaped in its shadow (and even now convinced it could have been won), “dangerous” hardly describes the results. They’ve helped bring us generational war and, for today’s young soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.

Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas.  Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast Fortress on a Hill.

This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World(Haymarket Books).

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-war-that-never-ends-for-the-u-s-military-high-command/