The bombing and war cult: "Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war."

Photo credit: Common Dreams (via AFP/Getty)

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He offers Ten Cautionary Tenets About Air Power, and tells it like it is -- although too many Americans on both sides of the political aisle aren't paying attention.

The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War, by William Astore (Common Dreams)

The very Dark Side of US air power

From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing -- and yet more bombing. Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington’s many conflicts. Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of “Made in USA” bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.

Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale ...

And the conclusion.

... If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn’t precise. It’s nasty, bloody, and murderous. War’s inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn’t changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington’s enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf.

Who doesn’t know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here’s a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless future of global destruction.

In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to perdition.

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.”

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.

Undisputed top MUST READ of the week: "The Iraq invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline."

Welcome to rock bottom.

Taibbi: The Legacy of the Iraq War, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

The invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline

Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. It was an awesome drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all.

People were looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes, shrugging, and asking: Can we really do this without a reason? That was the dramatic subtext of the invasion.

In the press, no one could really make sense of the supposed justification for the invasion. That it was compelling, no one could deny. Hell, just look at the fonts. We all used the biggest ones we had! The New York Times said it all with its dramatic banner:

"BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN"

GOON BOMBS CITY ON HORSESHIT PRETEXT would have been more accurate, but editors were giving everyone the benefit of the doubt back then, and getting on board, for patriotic reasons. The Gray Lady, who was playing such a key role in what was going on, was certainly getting in the spirit, giving in to the adrenaline rush of Bush's evil gambit.

It was the same with CNN's breathless coverage of that first night, with the creepy green-hued night-cams showing explosion after monster explosion.

Shock and awe, we called it: a new plan for "achieving rapid dominance." What a great Hollywood name, and goddamn if people didn't sit glued to their TVs to watch its rollout, getting off like a bunch of kids blowing up frogs.

Wars are great TV. The prolonged political lead-up, the decision to kill, it's all rich with suspense, and when wedded to the sight and the sound of the bombs, after waiting all those months for one nightfall, at the hour of crime and sex, to launch the first sorties from a secret location at sea – it all trips the senses. It's a turn on. It makes the Super Bowl look like paint drying. The sheer drama is how they sold this thing to the public, fifteen years ago this week.

But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."

As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few weeks back, talking about how we "blundered" into Iraq.

It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system ...

Our sad New Albanian reality; driver destroys sidewalk infrastructure in first recorded instance of anti-two-way street grid terrorism.

File under: "Cry for Help."

Dolt supremacy: Remembering Bill O'Reilly's role in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

The White Supremacy of Anti-Abortion Extremism

Occasionally when provoked, this 2010 column comes to my mind.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

It's just a bonus to be able to tie, Bill O'Reilly, Mike Pence, Nicolae Ceausescu and anti-abortion terrorists together in one big ball of "go away -- preferably to another planet."

Bill O'Reilly's Dangerous War Against Dr. Tiller, by David S. Cohen (Rolling Stone)

O'Reilly waged an unflagging harassment campaign against the abortion provider before Tiller was murdered in 2009

On May 31st, 2009, Scott Roeder assassinated Dr. George Tiller. Roeder had been waiting patiently that morning in the pews of Tiller's church. Right after Tiller finished his job as an usher, Roeder walked into the church foyer, pressed a gun against Tiller's forehead and shot him. He died from the single gunshot wound.

Roeder killed the doctor for one reason, and one reason only: Tiller was a prominent abortion provider – maybe even the most prominent in the country at the time – and Roeder wanted to stop abortion. No one questions that Roeder's radical anti-abortion views were responsible for Tiller's death.

But this, the day Bill O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, is a good time to remember O'Reilly's role in the Tiller tragedy – especially in the context of newly released statistics showing that harassment of abortion providers in various forms is on the increase.

O'Reilly had waged an unflagging war against Tiller that did just about everything short of urging his followers to murder him.

As testaments go, there are new and old -- so I'm told.

Muslim terrorists aren't the only ones being called to militancy by the "internet.' You'll see something like this on social media, repeated hundreds of times daily.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?? THEY WANT TO KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF US.

It tends to be followed immediately by self-identified Christians competing to topple the most mosques, close the greatest expanse of border, and confine the most Muslims in concentration camps.

I'm just the village atheist, and to be completely honest, very little of my time has been spent perusing that "good" book.

But really, an eye for an eye?

Jesus Christ, that's dumb ... although, on further reflection, He beat me to this conclusion long, long ago.

Sunday thinking: "Islamic Extremism Is Not the Root Cause of Europe’s Terror Problem."

The problem is “not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.”
-- Olivier Roy

In America, we have BOTH kinds of glib explanation: Black or White. Perhaps the only reason I continue to link to articles like this one is the entertainment value of being called out by local "Christians," who advise me that it doesn't matter -- just kill 'em all, and let the Christian "god" sort it out.

Islamic Extremism Is Not the Root Cause of Europe’s Terror Problem; European elites have a “youth revolt” on their hands, by Joshua Holland (The Nation)

 ... There’s a lot of focus on radical theology, and not enough on the conditions that allow it to take hold. European law enforcement, says Ahmed, “are analyzing this through the prism of theology. They’re studying the Koran for explanations, but what we’re seeing is nothing more than disaffected, disenchanted, illiterate young people who are not adjusting to society. Look at these young idiots who are blowing things up—they’re looking at ISIS videos with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other.”

Paris: We cannot defend values by abandoning them.

Photo credit: The Nation

I'm a cosseted white male American who has traveled a bit, just enough to understand that he doesn't know much at all about the wider world, and as such, intends to think about matters a while longer before spouting glib, ignorant gibberish on social media.

I'm a human with a brain, not Pavlov's mutt. Salivate at the ring of ISIS's bell, and it wins. Yes, I favor crushing terrorism, but not through emulating the methods of terrorists.

These three essays encapsulate my point of view, as stated far better than I'm capable at the moment. Take a moment, read and think.

The Guardian view on the Paris attacks: amid the grief, we must defend the values that define us (The Guardian)

To Defeat ISIS, We Must Call Both Western and Muslim Leaders to Account, by Laila Lalami (The Nation)

Paris: You Don’t Want to Read This, by Peter Van Buren (Common Dreams)

“I will always be convinced that I gave the right order.”

Your high school literature teacher tried his best to explain foreshadowing. Consider this obituary from July 1, 2014.

Anatoly Kornukov, Who Led Russian Air Force, Dies at 72, by Margalit Fox (NYT)

Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, a retired commander in chief of the Russian Air Force who in 1983 relayed the order to shoot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 as it strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 aboard, died on Tuesday in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow. He was 72.

As the songwriter observed, we have all been here before ... and that's regrettable.

Failed suicide bungler strikes Elsby Building, thereby reaffirming one-way street safety.

Cars race past the Elsby Building on New Albany's outmoded one-way street grid, because that's the way we've done it for 50 years, and we're too provincial to contemplate change.

A radical monster pickup truck advocacy sect member incensed by rumors that Spring Street might some day be restored to two way traffic attempted to destroy the Elsby Building on Monday afternoon. The outcome was foiled when his illegally obtained novelty lighter failed to ignite on impact with his cigarette, causing his cell phone to fall to the floorboard, and his vehicle to strike and break a plate glass window.

Afterward, the city engineer was to have verified the Elsby Building's continued structural viability, except that New Albany doesn't have a city engineer, and all the usual piecework temps were busy with the East Main Street Project's non-bicycle lanes. So they sent the dogcatcher instead.

"Looks good to me."

City Hall later released a statement:

"Citizens wishing to donate to the Elsby broken glass clean-up should make all checks out to the Dixiecratic Democratic Party."

It was the second such attack in a year's time. In 2013, less than two blocks away, a nearsighted driver rammed his vehicle into an architect's window, only to discover that it wasn't the public art project he hated so damned much.

"What a relief that we're an unwalkable city and he was only going 55 mph," commented John Rosenbarger, New Albany's Rasputin of Redevelopment. "If people would have been crowding the sidewalk like in Madrid, someone might have gotten killed. All the more reason to institute a system of one-way arterial streets downtown, leading to roundabouts and some street calming somewhere else in the outskirts of the city. It's what they do in other places we can't ever hope to become, but as long as we accomplish 5% of the work each year, that's 20 years guaranteed employment."

From his hospital bed, the suicide bumbler said, "The streets that God made one way, let no wussy hybrid driver tear asunder -- not to mention those stupid fucking pedestrians too poor to drive."

"Bail, Caesar!"

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?

Kitchen Fable hostage crisis enters Day 13. Where the hell is Jimmy Carter?

Last week, we broke the heartbreaking story of the Kitchen Table Tissues blog forced to go into hiding owing to terrorist attacks on its entire linoleum-lined braintrust.

Katie bar the cellar -- it's gotta be a prelude to a pot bust.

Sources close to the crisis say that in a note to the outside world smuggled from Hughie’s in a half full Bud Light bottle, the besieged blog administrator now threatens to "get all high and shit" unless someone sits up and takes notice.

A spokesman from the Troglodyte Civil Liberties Union (TCLU) says that while his organization has not been asked to mediate the crisis, there is a strong case for blue-helmeted intervention:

These poor disenfranchised character assassins are being denied their sole venue to make ridiculous, illiterate assertions and boundless, trognonymous allegations against their betters. We believe Kitchen Fable should appeal to the Human Rights Commission. You arrogant New Albanian elitists do have an HRC, don’t you?

The spokesman declined to be identified.

Link to an obituary.

Dr. George Tiller, 1941-2009, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation).

It isn't fascism if we do it.

She’s coming to Jeffersonville on Wednesday, and if that sort of kink appeals to you, make plans to attend the rally. The beer will be light, the oratory bitter, and jackboots are optional.

Campaign donations? Probably mandatory.

I can’t go, because I have a date to read the phonebook. Meanwhile …

Palin: 'I Don't Know' If Abortion Clinic Bombers Are Terrorists, from the Daily Kos, as relayed by www.alternet.org.

The buffoonish nature of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy has mostly been a disaster for the McCain-Palin campaign, but it is has delivered at least one benefit: her foibles have helped obscure the true nature of her right-wing extremism.

But now, Sarah Palin's self-destructive behavior is threatening to expose even that. In an interview broadcast yesterday on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams asked Palin whether she felt abortion clinic bombers were terrorists.

Amazingly, she said that she didn't know. MSNBC reports (emphasis added):

Palin resisted the suggestion that if Ayers was a "domestic terrorist" -- a standard line in her campaign addresses -- then so were conservative religious activists who bombed abortion clinics.

"I don't know if you're going to use the word 'terrorist' there," she said.