Trump’s Wars
There’s not a lot of nice things you can say about Donald Trump, but you can’t deny that the man tends to say the quiet part out loud more often than his predecessors. He’s been on the defensive regarding the military ever since The Atlantic reported that he called dead World War 1 soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” At a White House news conference this week, Trump implied that he’s disliked by The Pentagon because he wants to end the United States’ perpetual war on the rest of the planet. “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me, the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs & make the planes & make everything else stay happy,” he said.
This (factual) assertion predictably shocked and disturbed The Lincoln Project Brigade, “Never Trump” Republicans, and various sects of the wider Resistance Grift. It also mortified CNN National Security reporter Ryan Browne. He tweeted, “In an unprecedented public attack by a sitting US president on the leadership of the US military, President Trump has accused US military leaders of seeking to start wars to boost the profits of defense contractors.”
There’s been so many instructive papers and books written about our permanent war economy that it’s hard to know where to begin here. However, Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address is probably never the worst place to start. Here’s one part of it:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Eisenhower’s address was delivered back in 1961 and each one of his warnings has proven to be prescient, but these concerns have never been taken seriously and our foreign policy has not changed in any discernible way. It certainly hasn’t been altered under Trump. His point is correct, but the narrative that he’s stood up to the military-industrial complex is ridiculous. He’s expanded Obama’s drone program, increased the military budget, assassinated an Iranian general (the blowback from that move was an Iranian attack on Iraq that gave more than 100 American troops traumatic brain injuries), backed coups in Latin America, and vetoed a congressional attempt to stop Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. It might be superfluous to point this out (because every recent president is guilty of it too), but he has also funded Israeli apartheid and backed the country amid its many human rights abuses.
The Trump administration recently announced that it plans to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq down to 3,000. Any reduction should be welcomed, but it’s important to note this would merely bring the amount of troops back down to where it was the year before Trump was elected.
The troop reduction sure seems like another election Hail Mary (I guess “Centrist Grandpa Will Abolish the Suburbs!” is not working as intended), but that’s what makes it notable. If you needed a boost in the polls, bombing some random country used to be the move. Now it’s scaling back our wildly unpopular forever wars, or at least making it seem like you are. Progress of a kind.
Antiwar Vet Slams Trump
Back on Super Tuesday, Air Force veteran Michael Thurman confronted Joe Biden at a diner in Oakland over the candidate’s Iraq War vote. “We are just wondering why we should vote for someone who voted for a war and enabled a war that killed thousands of our brothers and sisters, countless Iraqi civilians,” he told Biden. Recently the clip went viral again, when Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a video of the incident and wrote, “Wow, an Air Force vet calls Biden out for voting for the Iraq War.” It was soon retweeted by the elder Trump.
Now, in an interview with In These Times (ITT), Thurman says that the Trump administration is using him as a prop. “I thought most of the other Democrats had a better record than Biden,” he told ITT’s Sarah Lazare, “I was more for Sanders and Warren. I definitely thought that Biden was the worst one out there. I think Trump is worse than Biden. It’s a really hard pill to swallow having to vote for Biden, but as a harm reduction approach, I feel like there is going to be less harm inflicted with Joe Biden as president than Trump.”
“This has been taken out of context and misconstrued,” he continued. “Trump is not anti-war. The wars that were started by George W. Bush and continued by the Obama administration, he has continued himself and expanded those wars. He has tried to foment more wars abroad with Iran, and he is fomenting a civil race war at home.”
Odds & Ends
?? A new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project has found that at least 37 million people have been displaced as a result of America’s so-called War on Terror. The actual number is no doubt much higher, as the investigation only included countries impacted by large counterterrorism operations. The real number is probably somewhere between 48 million and 59 million, according to the report.
David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University and the lead author of the study, told the New York Times, “This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars. It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”
?? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly opposed the Trump administration’s plan to sell the United Arab Emirates advanced weapons, but apparently he condoned the move in private.
?? According to a Military Times poll, active-duty troops think that white nationalism is a bigger security threat than North Korea, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
?? David Peyman has quite the title. He’s Deputy Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism for BDS, Eurasia & Special Projects at the State Department. He recently told the pro-Israel website The Algemeiner that the State Department is planning a wider crackdown on the BDS movement using “all legal and policy tools.”
? Joe Lieberman has endorsed Maine Senator (and Brett Kavanaugh supporter) Susan Collins. The ad he cut for the incumbent was paid for by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
? Earlier this year, Facebook announced the members of its Oversight Board, a body designed to address content moderation issues. One of them is Emi Palmor, who worked to censor pro-Palestine content as the General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice. JVP has a petition calling attention to the appointment: “Under Palmor, the Ministry of Justice established the Israeli Cyber Unit, which targeted Palestinian speech and coerced websites into taking down tens of thousands of pieces of content by Palestinians. Palmor’s resume should disqualify her from a role at Facebook supposedly designed to protect free speech.”
? According to Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book Rage, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson though that Jared Kushner’s interactions with Netanyahu were “nauseating” and “stomach churning.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
