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Here's my question of the week: When it comes to America's twenty-first-century wars, does the word "end" have any meaning at all? Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the war there is officially "ending" (as the Taliban takes large parts of the country) and all American troops are being withdrawn. Oops, except for the 650 being left behind to guard the American embassy in Kabul. It's also true that, even as most U.S. military personnel are indeed leaving, the brutal U.S. air war there, now being fought largely from bases in the Middle East, has yet to end. Indeed, among other places, American air power only recently blasted Taliban positions in parts of the city of Kandahar (undoubtedly killing civilians there, too). But rest assured, all of that will finally end on August 31st when the U.S. withdrawal is complete. Oops, except that Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the general running U.S. Central Command, is now suggesting that the air war may continue into the unknown future.
In a similar fashion, the Iraq War, which started with that "Mission Accomplished" invasion in the spring of 2003, is now finally ending, too. After all, every last American combat soldier still there is finally going to be withdrawn before 2022 begins. We know this because the Iraqi prime minister met President Biden at the White House recently and received that very promise. Oops, let me revise that just slightly. It turns out that Washington is really planning to withdraw at best only a few of the 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq, while relabeling all the rest "trainers" and "advisers." Hence, no combat troops will be there and our war will, thank god, finally be over (though no one's even considering touching, no less relabeling, the 700 or so U.S. troops stationed across the Iraqi border in Syria).
Oh, and remember when the last 700 U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia during Donald Trump's final days in office and the new Biden administration promptly shut down air attacks in that country? Well, that's now so been-there-done-that, too. American military advisers, relocated to neighboring lands, are still working with the Somali troops they used to train in-country and air strikes against the al-Shabaab terror group there have once again been launched.
In the twenty-first century, in other words, war never truly seems to end for this country. As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed, points out today, the strange thing is that, as a subject of debate, protest, or discussion, war simply has no place on the American political agenda and hasn't for years. Remember those giant antiwar demonstrations across the country before the invasion of Iraq began? Soon after, it seems, Americans simply withdrew from the very subject of our wars, leaving them (and all the endless taxpayer dollars that went with them) for a succession of administrations and the military-industrial complex to deal with. No point in bothering our pretty little heads about such matters, is there? Tom
Answering the Armies of the Cheated
But No Questions about War Please!
"The thirty-year interregnum of U.S. global hegemony," writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, "has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell." Today, he continues, "the armies of the cheated are struggling to find the word for something that happened and happened wrong."
In fact, the armies of the cheated know exactly what happened, even if they haven't yet settled on precisely the right term to describe the disaster that has befallen this nation.
What happened was this: shortly after the end of the Cold War, virtually the entire American foreign-policy establishment succumbed to a monumentally self-destructive ideological fever.
Call it INS, shorthand for Indispensable Nation Syndrome. Like Covid-19, INS exacts a painful toll of victims. Unlike Covid, we await the vaccine that can prevent its spread. We know that preexisting medical conditions can increase a person's susceptibility to the coronavirus. The preexisting condition that increases someone's vulnerability to INS is the worship of power.
Back in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright not only identified INS, but also captured its essence. Appearing on national TV, she famously declared, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Now, allow me to be blunt: this is simply not true. It's malarkey, hogwash, bunkum, and baloney. Bullshit, in short.
The United States does not see further into the future than Ireland, Indonesia, or any other country, regardless of how ancient or freshly minted it may be. Albright's assertion was then and is now no more worthy of being taken seriously than Donald Trump's claim that the "deep state" engineered the coronavirus pandemic. Also bullshit.
Some of us (but by no means all Americans) have long since concluded that Trump was and remains a congenital liar. To charge Albright with lying, however, somehow rates as bad form, impolite, even rude. She is, after all, a distinguished former official and the recipient of many honors.
Trump's lies have made him persona non grata in polite society. Albright has not suffered a similar fate. And to be fair, Albright herself is not solely or even mainly responsible for the havoc that INS has caused. While the former secretary of state promoted the syndrome in notably expansive language, the substance of her remark was anything but novel. She was merely reiterating what, in Washington, still passes for a self-evident truism: America must lead. No conceivable alternative exists. Leadership implies responsibilities and, by extension, confers prerogatives. Put crudely more crudely than Albright would have expressed it to a television audience we make the rules.
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