All empires end messily, including America's.

As in all such matters, we begin by noting that individuals serving in the military don't choose the rationale for their deployment. This is done by political figures for various reasons, few of them involving integrity. So it has been, and so it shall remain, at least until "we the people" have the gumption to think about it.

Donald Trump’s rant against Iran is the howl of a dying empire, by Simon Jenkins (The Guardian)

As the president slurred ritualised abuse of Iran and pleas to Nato, we saw the US’s days as world hegemon dribbling away

 ... All empires outstay their declared purpose, let alone their welcome. All end messily – the operative word is all – be they Roman, Napoleonic, British or Soviet. All are vanquished not by superior power, but by self-delusion and geography. The British empire had neither the right nor the need to invade far-flung parts of Asia and Africa. It was defeated by them. The US has claimed the right to intervene in theatres as diverse as South America, the far east, east Africa and a portfolio of Muslim states. Justification varies from retaliation and deterrence to “self-defence” and the instilling of democracy.

The US’s intentions have often been noble, but good intentions camouflage power projection. When your drones can kill anyone anywhere, the temptation is insuperable. If you think you can police the world from a bunker in Nevada, why not try?

Trump’s instinct was once that of a classic American isolationist. As he reiterated to Congress last February, “Great nations do not fight endless wars … the hour has come to at least try for peace.” He was announcing withdrawal from Syria and more tentatively from Afghanistan. Yet he is still there. The US is fighting six wars – also in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. None has any conceivable relevance to its own security.

Imperialism sticks to politics like glue. Even as common sense screams withdrawal, staying offers the populist an opportunity for glory.

snip

Twenty years of western interventions in the Muslim world have rested on two falsehoods. One is that terrorism poses an existential threat to western democracies, grotesquely underrating their inherent stability. The other is that intervention can remedy such a threat, can enforce obedience and even democracy on victim states ... the issue now is not whether we can any longer plant the flowers of democracy in fields we have drenched in blood. It is how to get the hell out. The sight of Trump ranting against Iran and inflicting on it yet further sanctions was like the final scene of a tragic opera. He seemed a man trapped.

Two American presidents played a significant role in the demise of British imperialism. Franklin D Roosevelt told Winston Churchill that the US’s involvement in the second world war was strictly on condition that Britain dissolved its empire. The US would not defend it. John Foster Dulles, who was later US secretary of state, said in 1945 that his was “the first colony to have won independence” from Britain, and it expected others to follow. This advice was fiercely echoed in 1956 by Dwight D Eisenhower, appalled at Britain’s invasion of Suez.

Iraqi politicians this week joined the anti-imperial cause by demanding that American forces be withdrawn from their soil. All Trump could do was refuse, despite having previously pledged to do just that. Even in its hour of insecurity, 17 years of American occupation had left Iraq just desperate for it to end. It knows it must live at peace with its powerful neighbour, Iran, and this requires it to be no longer to be a tool of American presidential machismo. Likewise Afghanistan must find its own accommodation with the Taliban and with its neighbour, Pakistan ...

"American conservatives who find themselves identifying with Putin’s regime refuse to see the country for what it actually is."

Here's the pitch.

The belief that Russia is on our side in the war against secularism and sexual decadence is shared by a host of American Christian leaders, as well as their colleagues on the European far right.

Then this.

I his book, (Paul) Hollander described the prestige that Albanian communism once enjoyed in Sweden and Norway. Few Scandinavians had ever been there, but that didn’t matter: “Albania is picked up simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one’s own society, one’s own traditions, one’s own parents.” Now (Tucker) Carlson is using Russia as a club with which to beat his own society and his own traditions.

Whenever I hear the likes of Franklin Graham referred to as an "intellectual," I reach for my flask and eat lots of garlic. Thanks to the Bookseller for pointing the way to this fine read.

The False Romance of Russia, by Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

American conservatives who find themselves identifying with Putin’s regime refuse to see the country for what it actually is.

... Fortunately for all such critics, they don’t have to spend much time in the country they are “rooting” for, because there is no greater fantasy than the idea that Russia is a country of Christian values. In reality, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, nearly double that of the United States. It has an extremely low record of church attendance, though the numbers are difficult to measure, not least because any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. A 2012 survey showed that religion plays an important role in the lives of only 15 percent of Russians. Only 5 percent have read the Bible.

If American Christians would find little to cheer for in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, American white nationalists would be disappointed too. Carlson has wondered aloud about America’s racial mix, asking, “How precisely is diversity our strength?” He would have a real dilemma in Russia. Nearly 20 percent of Russian citizens do not even identify as Russian, telling pollsters that they belong to different nationalities, ranging from Tartar and Azeri to Ukrainian and Moldovan; more than 6 percent of Russians are Muslims, as opposed to 1.1 percent of the U.S. population. And that might be a gross underestimate of the actual number of Russian Muslims, since in some parts of the country, Muslims are off-limits to census takers. Remember all those phony stories about Swedish and British neighborhoods that are supposedly no-go zones ruled by Sharia law? Russia has an actual province, Chechnya, that is officially ruled by Sharia law. The local regime tolerates polygamy, requires women to be veiled in public places, and tortures gay men. It is a no-go zone, right inside Russia.

As for Putin himself, there is no evidence that this former KGB officer has actually converted, but plenty of evidence that Putin’s recent public displays of Christianity are just as cynical as Stalin’s vaunted love for the working classes. Among other things, they are useful precisely because they can hoodwink naive foreigners. But you don’t need to listen to me say so. Listen, instead, to the words of a young Russian, Yegor Zhukov, who was put on trial for publishing videos critical of the regime. In an extraordinary courtroom speech, he addressed the loud support for “the institutions of the family” that Putin often offers in Russia, and contrasted it with reality ...

Hunter Biden, et al: "Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense, but prominent Americans also shouldn’t be leveraging their names for payoffs from shady clients abroad."

More essential reading. If we're to endure this impeachment process, it seems a shame to condone one variety of corruption while prosecuting a second, merely to suit the political objectives of the two-party duopoly.

Anyone got a big-ass broom for both?

Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption, by Sarah Chayes (The Atlantic)

Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense, but prominent Americans also shouldn’t be leveraging their names for payoffs from shady clients abroad.

How did this get to be standard practice?

The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?

Voicing this question now invites an immediate objection: “false equivalence.” Let’s dispense with it. What Donald Trump has done—in this case, according to the summary of a single phone call, lean on a foreign president to launch two spurious investigations in order to hurt political rivals, offering the services of the U.S. Department of Justice for the purpose—is shockingly corrupt, a danger to American democracy, and worthy of impeachment.

But the egregiousness of these acts must not blind us to the culture of influence-peddling that surrounds and enables them. That culture is fundamental to the cynical state we are in, and it needs examining. All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted ...

"Militarization Has Become Our National Religion."

By means of introduction, The Nation explains.

America’s twenty-first-century wars have been coming home in another way as well: in the increasingly worshipful attitudes of so many Americans (especially those in the seats of power in Washington, D.C.) toward the Pentagon and the U.S. military, as vividly described today by retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore.

Astore's list of "what we believe" is chilling, and sadly correct.

In Wars and Weapons We Trust: America’s Militarized Profession of Faith, by William J. Astore (Tom Dispatch)

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church) and to the soaring warbirds of the U.S. military, which I believed kept us safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American technological superiority over the godless Communists.

With all its scandals, especially when it came to priestly sexual abuse, I lost my faith in the Catholic Church. Indeed, I would later learn that there had been a predatory priest in my own parish when I was young, a grim man who made me uneasy at the time, though back then I couldn’t have told you why. As for those warbirds, like so many Americans, I thrilled to their roar at air shows, but never gave any real thought to the bombs they were dropping in Vietnam and elsewhere, to the lives they were ending, to the destruction they were causing. Nor, at that age, did I ever consider their enormous cost in dollars or just how much Americans collectively sacrificed to have “top cover,” whether of the warplane or godly kind.

There were good and devoted priests in my Catholic diocese. There were good and devoted public servants in the U.S. military. Admittedly, I never seriously considered the priesthood, but I did sign up for the Air Force, surprising myself by serving in it for 20 years. Still, both institutions were then, and remain, deeply flawed. Both seek, in a phrase the Air Force has long used, “global reach, global power.” Both remain hierarchies that regularly promote true believers to positions of authority. Both demand ultimate obedience. Both sweep their sins under the rug. Neither can pass an audit. Both are characterized by secrecy. Both seem remarkably immune to serious efforts at reform. And both, above all, know how to preserve their own power, even as they posture and proselytize about serving a higher one.

However, let me not focus here on the one “holy catholic and apostolic church,” words taken from the “profession of faith” I recited during Mass each week in my youth. I’d prefer to focus instead on that other American holy church, the U.S. military, with all its wars and weapons, its worshipers and wingmen, together with its vision of global dominance that just happens to include end-of-world scenarios as apocalyptic as those of any imaginable church of true believers. I’m referring, of course, to our country’s staggeringly large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, just now being updated -- the term seems to be “modernized” -- to the tune of something like $1.7 trillion over the decades to come ...

Bernie Sanders on Donald Trump's "saber rattling" over Iran.

Bernie Sanders was on Face the Nation last Sunday.

Bernie Sanders Is Exactly Right About Trump’s Saber Rattling on Iran, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In a remarkable exchange, the senator rejects the notion that a “limited strike” on Iran is anything less than “an act of warfare” that could lead to catastrophe.

The topic of the aborted air strike against Iran was raised.

Oh, just a limited strike; oh, well, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know that it’s okay to simply attack another country with bombs. ‘Just a limited strike’—that’s an act of warfare. So two points. That will set off a conflagration all over the Middle East… The war in Iraq, Margaret was a disaster I believe from the bottom of my heart that (a war) with Iran would be even worse, more loss of life never ending war in that region, massive instability. We’re talking about, we have been in Afghanistan now for eighteen years. This thing will never end. So I will do everything I can number one to stop a war with Iran. And number two here’s an important point. Let’s remember what we learned in civics when we were kids. It is the United States Congress, under our Constitution, that has warmaking authority not the president of the United States. If he attacks Iran in my view that would be unconstitutional.

At greater length:

Sanders discusses the subject at considerably more length in an important new article for Foreign Affairs—“Ending America’s Endless War”—in which he argues, “Terrorism is a very real threat, which requires robust diplomatic efforts, intelligence cooperation with allies and partners, and yes, sometimes military action. But as an organizing framework, the global war on terror has been a disaster for our country. Orienting U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism essentially allowed a few thousand violent extremists to dictate the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. We responded to terrorists by giving them exactly what they wanted.” The article concludes:

The American people don’t want endless war. Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values. We have to view the terrorism threat through the proper scope, rather than allowing it to dominate our view of the world. The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people.

For the bottom line, however, go back to the video, where Sanders rejects the empty language of political and media elites and clearly explains that “The United States does not want to continue to lose men and women and trillions of dollars in never-ending wars in the Middle East.”

America as planetary policeman: "When an entire political establishment says a decision is mad, I tend to think something in it must be right."

From the very inception of this blog in 2004, our credo has remained consistent.

New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?

Neither Jeff Gahan nor Donald Trump are right very often, but the law of averages as symbolized by NAC's stopped pre-digital clock suggests both occasionally will stumble on truth by accident.

As such, Trump's assertion that "the United States cannot continue to be policeman to the world," while lost amid the clamor of his Mexican wall boneheadedness, is worthy of examination and support. This British fellow explains.

Trump has a point – the world should start solving its own problems, by Simon Jenkins (The Guardian)

For all his antics on the Mexican border, the US president is right to be withdrawing troops from Syria

 ... when an entire political establishment says a decision is mad, I tend to think something in it must be right. Thus with Trump’s announcement last month that he was pulling America’s 2,000 troops out of Syria. “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” he tweeted emphatically. That he could do this after an amiable chat with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and without telling his commanders, was staggering.

Trump’s argument is that getting out of America’s wars was a campaign pledge. The Syrian intervention was never meant to be permanent and had already crippled Isis. “People are going to have to start doing a lot of their own work,” he added, “because the United States cannot continue to be policeman to the world” ...

Going deeper:

Trump is entitled to put “America first” in the Middle East, and that slogan may explain his trade barriers against Canada and China. But like the Mexican wall, such policies have nothing to do with America’s national security. The US must be the safest country on the planet. Its home territory has never been so much as menaced by a foreign power, let alone invaded. Two oceans protect it east and west. 9/11 aside, terrorist incidents have been homegrown. Wars abroad, from Vietnam to Syria, have reflected some neo‑imperial hegemonic urge, similar to that which used to grip Britain. The effect has been to turn the US from policeman to random vigilante.

The politics of fear has long been the default mode of the insecure statesman. The parading of military muscle still permeates the US’s public realm and has become a shop window for what President Eisenhower termed the anti-democratic “military-industrial complex”. Its endless aggrandisement boosts military spending and upholds the cause of an American presence across the globe. It worships daily at the altar of national security.

American aid to Nato has long underpinned Europe’s security, but that does not undermine Trump’s challenge, that the rest of the world should start solving its own problems ...

Looking for bipartisan consensus? Unfortunately, endless wars fill the bill.

Follow the money.
Follow the money.
Follow the money.

Rinse and repeat.

How to Challenge the Elite Consensus for Endless War, by Andrew J. Bacevich (The Nation)

There’s only one way: ​We have to harness the energy of millions of fed-up voters.

 ... the contours of basic policy evade critical examination, and American wars continue as if on autopilot.

The circumstances permitting this mindless undertaking to persist are so well-known that they hardly bear repeating. They include a brain-dead policy elite; a military system that insulates the vast majority of Americans from sacrifice; a cynical decision to saddle future generations with the responsibility to pay for today’s wars while the present generation enjoys tax cuts; congressional abdication of its constitutionally assigned war powers, compounded by more than a few members of the House and Senate being deeply in hock to the military-industrial complex; the hiring of what Tom Engelhardt has dubbed “warrior corporations”—profit-minded contractors, proxies, and mercenaries—effectively hiding the magnitude of war from American view; the absorption of available political energy by eminently worthy causes—the anti-Trump resistance and #MeToo offer examples—that inadvertently consign war to the margins; and finally, divisions within the feeble anti-war camp, one wing leaning left, the other leaning right, with neither willing to make common cause on matters where their views coincide.

Of course, underlying these is the enduring conceit, regularly celebrated in Washington, that Providence summons the United States to exercise global leadership now and forever, with that leadership expressed primarily through threatened or real military action. All of these together create a layered and interlocking defense that insulates the militarized status quo from challenge.

Even so, the profound American disregard for actual policy outcomes remains something of a puzzle. After all, at some level we see ourselves as a pragmatic people, preferring what works to what doesn’t. Yet as far as our wars are concerned, the gap between declared intentions and the results achieved continues to grow from one year to the next, while political elites, for the most part, pretend not to notice. Let Afghanistan, a conflict now promising to extend into eternity, serve as the prosecution’s exhibit number one.

Here, I submit, part of the problem lies with Trump himself, widely viewed by members of the intelligentsia as a noxious charlatan. For this very reason, when the president, however inadvertently, utters a self-evident truth—that our post-9/11 wars cost a lot and aren’t working—his endorsement of that truth drains it of significance. It’s akin to an involuntary reflex: If Trump says our wars have achieved nothing, then surely they must have done some good, right?

Yet, however ironically, Trump’s own ascent to the presidency might itself offer a clue about how to extricate ourselves from these “forever wars.”

Choking on it: "What Caused the United States’ Decline?"

As a useful preface, it helps to know that I consider American "exceptionalism" to be sheer idiocy. 

Ironically, former foreign service officer Louis Sell, now an author and teacher, was at the Louisville Free Public Library on Thursday evening to discuss his latest book. It's about US-Soviet relations in the context of the USSR's collapse, Sell's take was wonderful, and the topic provides an excellent segue into Tom Engelhardt's piece.

Why are we in a state of constant warfare throughout the world, having reached a point where so many Americans on the left side of the aisle are as hawkishly interventionalist, if not more bellicose, than the ones on the right?

Part of it owes to the vast extent of consumer borne fantasy-as-lifestyle, the sort of daily escapism that hinders realism once one steps outside the movie theater or  away from the video game console.

But more importantly in terms of America as nation-state, it's about biting off more than we might possibly chew, because we no longer were contained by the Cold War stalemate -- and both God and Big Money told us so.

Who's going to perform the Heimlich maneuver for the United States?

Han Solo, perhaps?

What Caused the United States’ Decline? by Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch.com, via The Nation)

Hint: you don’t have to look far.

When it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.

AMERICA CONTAINED

In a way, it’s the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never — not until recently at least — empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.

Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth — at least in retrospect — was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”

In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.

This equilibrium lasted until the USSR's collapse in 1991, and ten years later, Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks provided the opportunity for W & Co. to try swallowing the planet.

It's been mostly downhill ever since.

Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.

The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.

Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.

All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.

A Jacobin doubleheader: "The Case for Single-Payer" and "Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus."

Thinking, drinking and surveying the landscape, there is serious doubt in my mind that I can ever again identify with an American political party, especially the two biggest political monopolies.

I’m also no longer interested in fealty to symbols. I genuinely respect YOUR superstitions and addictions, so long as they don’t intrude on my space. I won’t whistle or splutter karaoke. By the same token, my butt and knee are mine, not yours. Open your eyes and see the world around you. Follow the money.

But I digress. Insofar as the various branches of Let's Pretend We're Democrats can get aboard with ideas like the two that follow, all the better. I might yet vote for them on occasion.

Otherwise, the tag "independent" largely summarizes my lot in life. So be it, although running for a council seat as a Sanders-style indie "genuine" Democrat still might be great fun, only if I can suppress the gag reflex at the thought of  the party's local management.

The Case for Single-Payer, by Timothy Faust (Jacobin)

Winning Medicare for All would allow us to take a giant step toward health justice.

Last month, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders introduced his Medicare for All Act — a bill that, if passed, would establish a federal, universal, single-payer health care system in the US. The legislation stands against a cruel summer of “repeal and replace” blood lust, most recently championed by senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, and years of mewling, milquetoast non-ideas from mainstream Democrats.

Toward Health Justice

The United States may be a country where Saudi princes can fly to get a heart transplant, but it remains a place where poor men die fourteen years earlier than rich men. In a land of resplendence, the powerful condemn the marginalized to chronic illness, because it’s not profitable to provide nutritious food or adequate shelter.

Fragmented and commodified, the present model treats health care as something that only happens when people are insured, not a holistic process spanning an entire life. Single-payer could begin to change this. Once the federal actor bears the costs of providing care and not providing care, it could finally be a tool for realizing health justice.

If people are getting sick and dying because they don’t have a place to live, or if the places they live are unsafe, then housing is health care, and you build housing to bring health care costs down. If people don’t have access to healthy food to eat, then food is health care, and you provide them with affordable or free food options to bring health care costs down. If people live in fear of their personal safety — if they are assaulted or beaten at home, at work, by the police, or by their domestic partners — then safety is a form of health care, and you provide safe havens for them to bring health care costs down.

In other words, a single-payer program is not the goal. Single-payer on its own cannot be the goal. Single-payer does not solve the biggest sin of commodified health care: that taking care of sick people isn’t profitable, and any profit-driven insurance system thus disregards the most vulnerable.

Sick people, people with disabilities, poor people, pregnant people, trans people, people of color — all of them are valuable to insurance markets only inasmuch as profit can be extracted from them; afterward, they are drained, discarded, abandoned to charity care, or, absent that, to the carceral state. Corporations have proven themselves unable and unwilling to look these problems in the eye, and people suffer while Democrats use public money to bribe corporations into trying to ameliorate the health care crisis.

Single-payer alone does not solve these problems. But it gives us a fighting chance to square up against them ...

Then there's this wonderful opening sentence.

Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders showed his commitment to a sharp break from the foreign policy platforms of both the Democratic and Republican establishments.

It connects to a long overdue foreign policy rethink ... but the robber barons aren't going to like it.

Breaking from the Consensus

Perhaps most significantly, Sanders used his speech to rebuke not just the neoconservative worldview, but some of the core precepts of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, like the concept of American exceptionalism and the projection of “toughness” through a willingness to use force.

“Blustery threats of force, while they might make a few columnists happy, can often signal weakness as much as strength, diminishing US deterrence, credibility, and security in the process,” he said in a thinly veiled dig at Trump, currently in the midst of an unnecessary contest of brinkmanship with the North Korean dictator.

Going further, Sanders declare the death of the concept of a US “benevolent global hegemony” — a notion embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike and often used to justify meddling in foreign countries. Events like the Iraq War, he said, “have utterly discredited that vision.”

In a rather remarkable section of his speech, Sanders went further than just about any mainstream US policymaker in rattling off a list of the US government’s past misdeeds — some of which, he noted, the US public would probably be aghast to learn about for the first time. To justify his point that intervention and force are the wrong approach, he cited events like the Iraq and Vietnam wars as well as the 1973 military coup in Chile. He particularly stressed the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government, engineered by both the US and British governments, which, as he noted, ultimately resulted in the country’s 1979 revolution and the anti-American hostility the US contends with today.

“What would Iran look like today if their democratic government had not been overthrown?” he asked the audience. “What consequences are we still living with today?”

Now more than ever: "US Military Should Get Out of the Middle East."

Hama Rules, 1982.

It isn't minimizing the horror of chemical weapons to offer a reminder that there is a thing called Assad-Vu in Syria: they've all been here before.

1982 Hama massacre

I've been around for 12 presidents (yes, a few months of Eisenhower, too), split between seven Republicans and five Democrats, and while they may seem to have little in common, most have seemed quite willing to bomb things. This might constitute something of a trend.

Journalist Phillip M. Bailey‏ won last night's local Internet with this:

Now we get to watch #Dems and #GOP switch their positions on #Syria airstrikes.

Yep.

US Military Should Get Out of the Middle East, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Common Dreams)

It’s time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings — the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region. That approach has instructive historical precedents.

America has been no different from other imperial powers in finding itself ensnared repeatedly in costly, bloody, and eventually futile overseas wars. From the Roman empire till today, the issue is not whether an imperial army can defeat a local one. It usually can, just as the United States did quickly in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The issue is whether it gains anything by doing so. Following such a “victory,” the imperial power faces unending heavy costs in terms of policing, political instability, guerrilla war, and terrorist blowback.

Terrorism is a frequent consequence of imperial wars and imperial rule. Local populations are unable to defeat the imperial powers, so they impose high costs through terror instead.

Cuba! Africa! Revolution!

Che Guevara's foray into the Congo in 1965 ended badly, but Fidel Castro was playing a long game, and Cuba's adventures in Africa reached critical mass in Angola during the mid-1980s.

Between Washington and Moscow: the cultural impact of the Cold War in Africa (The World Weekly)

Among many revelations in this excellent two-hour documentary is the USSR's continuing annoyance with Castro's tendency to slip the presumed leash. When Mikhail Gorbachev made negotiations with America his prime focus, Cuba became the leading exponent of Communism measured by troops on the ground.

The US Department of State knew how many Cuban troops were in Angola from the number of baseball diamonds as observed by satellite; Cuban army regulations stipulated a baseball field for every "x" number of soldiers, almost a half million of whom returned home after the 1988 peace accords. Castro justified it as anti-imperialism, and few Americans know the cross-currents in Angola in the 1980s.

Variables included the legacy of three separate armed Angolan forces, South Africa's national security via power politics, independence for neighboring Namibia, Castro's determination to bring about the end of apartheid, Gorbachev and the declining Soviet influence internationally, and of course Ronald Reagan's aggressive determination to make life difficult for Soviets and Cubans wherever they were located.

The testimony of the principles is what sets this film apart. Many key players from all eras were alive to tell the tale in the early 2000s, although several have died since, including the Falstaffian character Jorge Risquet. His unlikely meeting with South Africa's Pik Botha in a Cairo hotel bar provided an impetus to talks that led ultimately to agreement -- and at least made a minor contribution to the freeing of Nelson Mandela two years later.

Risquet's fondness for cigars is an amusing sidebar to the preceding. In summary, it's like a Cold War diplomacy primer, perhaps no longer useful, but still instructive.

I'm unsure which of two titles is accurate. Strictly speaking, the videos are taken from the BBC4 program Storyville, and comprise Cuba! Africa! Revolution! Elsewhere they're referred to as Cuba: An African Odyssey. The director is Jihan El Tahri, and the release date is 2007.

Tuesday Heresy Quartet 2 of 4: "A proper response to the Islamic State has to be proportional to the real threat."

"After all, we have fire departments always on call, but they don't ride around spraying water on homes 24/7 out of 'an abundance of caution.'"

This essay is incredibly sensible. These ideas doesn't stand a chance, do they?

You Won't Like It, But Here's the Answer to ISIS, by Peter Van Buren (Common Dreams)

Giving advice to a presidential candidate who wants to "DO something"

... If your candidate needs a what-hasn’t-worked summary statement, it’s simple: everything. To any argument you make to your preferred presidential candidate about what did not “work,” you need to add a sober assessment of the real impact of terrorism on the United States in order to ask the question: Why exactly are we engaged in this war on this scale?

Bill Maher: Is the US the world's policeman, or a schoolyard bully?

Bill Maher quite simply rocks.

The US: world's policeman or schoolyard bully? Ever since 9/11, it seems America's just been itching for a fight – and any Muslim country will do. Really, who acts like this?, by Bill Maher (The Guardian)

New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, "Why do they hate us?" Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we're always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we're starting to look not so much like the world's policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it's because we had no choice.

Now, I'm against chemical weapons, and I don't care who knows it. And there's no doubt a guy like Bashar al-Assad deserves to get blown up: using toxic chemicals on unsuspecting civilians is purely and profoundly evil.

But enough about Monsanto ...

Pierce: "Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name."

Classic rant, spot on.

Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

OK, let us persist in the notion that I am an American citizen. Let us persist in the notion that I am the citizen of a self-governing political commonwealth. Let us persist in the notion that I have a say -- and important and equal say -- in the operation of my government here and out in the world. Let us persist in the notion that, in America, the people rule. If we persist in these notions -- and, if we don't, what's the fking point, really? -- then there is only one question that I humbly ask of my government this week.

Please, if it's not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what's being done in my name?

"Romney sounded like he was taking history at one of those Jesus-on-a-dinosaur middle schools that 'Bobby' Jindal has opened in Louisiana."

Last evening I was watching the baseball game whilst idly perusing Twitter to observe reactions to the presidential debate. It occurred to me that while Barack Obama thoroughly trouncing Mitt Romney in a foreign policy exchange was the entirely expected outcome, numerous topics of genuine importance to the planet were being excluded from the discussion.

About the time in San Francisco that the propaganda exercise known as "let's forever sully the seventh inning stretch with nonsensical renditions of 'Nonexistent God Bless America' rather than Woody Guthrie's far more sensible 'This Land Is Your Land'" commenced, two thoughts surfaced.

1. When the Romney voters stop buying cheap Chinese crap at Wal-Mart, maybe I'll take them seriously.

2. American exceptionalism is bullshit. It always has been, and it always will be. A god that doesn't exist chose us to lead the world, and so now we're absolved of thinking about much of anything short of pounding on our chests and being boorish.

Here is more on Romney's debacle, courtesy of Charlie Pierce and John Nichols.

Nothing Is Foreign to the Liar Willard Romney Anymore: A Report from the Flippy-Floppy Final Debate of 2012, by Charles P. Pierce ("The Politics Blog" at Esquire)

... That is what history always has told us about the career of Willard Romney: sooner or later, he will sell your ass out to the highest bidder and walk away whistling in the general direction of anything to which he feels entitled. In this case, that would be the leadership of the Free World.

... Romney sounded like he was taking history at one of those Jesus-on-a-dinosaur middle schools that "Bobby" Jindal has opened in Louisiana. And yet, this abysmal ignorance may not come to matter a damn.

A discussion of foreign policy that did not mention climate change. (Four debates and nary a mention. Somebody else is going to have to tell the polar bears.) A discussion of foreign policy that mentioned teacher's unions exactly as many times — once — as it mentioned the Palestinians, and I am not making that statistic up. A discussion of foreign policy that did not mention hunger, or thirst, or epidemic disease, but spent better than ten minutes on The Fking Deficit. (Here Romney cited in defense of his position that noted political economist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) A discussion of foreign policy that was all about threats, real and imagined, and wars, real or speculative, and weapons, and how many of them we should build in order to feel safe in this dangerous world. (Romney actually argued that we should go back to the "two-war" strategy that we followed throughout the Cold War. Against whom in god's name does he think we'll be fighting the second war?)

At The Nation, Nichols echoes Pierce's annoyance as to what was omitted. The plan fact is that precious few Americans are sufficiently informed about the world, and do not possess the means to consider it even if there was a reality television show devoted to foreign policy.

Foreign Policy Really Is Foreign to Mitt Romney, by John Nichols (The Nation)

... Undecided voters surveyed by CBS agreed, indicating in a snap poll that Obama had won the commander-in-chief test by a staggering 53-23 margin. That was a wider margin than Romney got after the first debate that was broadly seen as his big win.

All of this was good news for Obama, if not necessarily for the national discourse. In too many senses, Monday night’s debate was a confirmation of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that so frustrates Americans who want a broader debate on fundamental questions of war and peace, globalization and human rights. And it was a reminder that alternative candidates, such as Green party presidential nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson, should have been included in these debates.

"The end of the New World Order," and Ministry.

It's foreign affairs morning here at the blog, providing me with a bit more time to finish my point-by-point refutation of the 'Bune's most recent badly written editorial about the city's parks secession.

The end of the New World Order: The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow, by Seumas Milne (The Guardian)

 ... In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.

But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.