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War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
So that classic late 1960s song claimed. Still, for Bill Astore and me (and, I have little doubt, Joe Biden, too), such a thought didn't cross our minds as we played with toy soldiers on the floors of our rooms as kids. I can still remember spending endless hours refighting both the Civil War and World War II -- the war my father was in and, strangely enough, at least to me then, wouldn't talk about -- with my books piled high to create canyons and islands. However, as TomDispatch regular Astore says today, growing older, we did leave those toy soldiers and the floor wars behind, though he ended up an officer in the U.S. Air Force and I must admit that, 60-odd years later, I still have a box of the Blue and the Gray somewhere deep in a closet and a tiny General Ulysses S. Grant on a horse perched on a shelf by the desk where I'm writing this.
Ah, we boys and our toy soldiers. Unfortunately, at some level, it seems as if our leaders didn't leave them behind at all. Only recently, three all-too-real American soldiers were killed in a drone strike on a base at Jordan's border with Syria. And grim as that was -- as well as a grim reminder that, so many years after America's major wars in the Middle East ended, tens of thousands of our troops are still stationed on bases scattered across the region -- the response has been grimmer yet. The Biden administration began with air strikes (including by B-1B bombers flown all the way from Texas) on 85 targets at seven sites in Iraq and Syria. Those sites were theoretically connected to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's Quds Force and affiliated groups. But as Simona Foltyn recently reported for the PBS NewsHour, some of those planes actually devastated an Iraqi force that claims to have had nothing to do with any attacks on U.S. bases, while also killing civilians. A day later, yet more air strikes were launched against the Houthis in Yemen. Republican lawmakers promptly claimed that such strikes were distinctly "too little, too late." And of course, even more plane, missile, and drone strikes across the region followed. As yet, there's no end in sight to the reprisals for the deaths of those three Americans, even as the utter humanitarian disaster in Gaza and the possibility of a larger conflict in the region only grow.
All of this should be a reminder that this country, whatever the pretensions of its leadership and its national security bureaucracy, is no longer the sole superpower on Planet Earth as it was in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's a declining imperial power, increasingly in chaos at home. But with that, let me point you toward the floor of retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular Bill Astore's childhood room and let him take it from there. Tom
Bombing Muslims for Peace
Isn't It Time to Put Our Toy Soldiers Away (Along with Our Illusions)?
Like many American boys of the baby-boomer generation, I played "war" with those old, olive-drab, plastic toy soldiers meant to evoke our great victory over the Nazis and "the Japs" during World War II. At age 10, I also kept a scrapbook of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its various Arab enemies in the Middle East. It was, I suppose, an early sign that I would make both the military and the study of history into careers.
I recall rooting for the Israelis, advertised then as crucial American allies, against Egypt, Syria, and other regional enemies at least ostensibly allied with the Soviet Union in that Cold War era. I bought the prevailing narrative of a David-versus-Goliath struggle. I even got a book on the Yom Kippur War that captivated me by displaying all the weaponry the U.S. military had rushed to Israel to turn the tide there, including F-4 Phantom jets and M-60 main battle tanks. (David's high-tech slingshots, if you will.) Little did I know that, in the next 50 years of my life, I would witness increasingly destructive U.S. military attacks in the Middle East, especially after the oil cartel OPEC (largely Middle Eastern then) hit back hard with an embargo in 1973 that sent our petroleum-based economy into a tailspin.
As one jokester quipped: Who put America's oil under the sands of all those ungrateful Muslim countries in the Middle East? With declarations like the Carter Doctrine in 1980, the U.S. was obviously ready to show the world just how eagerly it would defend its "vital interests" (meaning fossil fuels, of course) in that region. And even today, as we watch the latest round in this country's painfully consistent record of attempting to pound various countries and entities there into submission, mainly via repetitive air strikes, we should never forget the importance of oil, and lots of it, to keep the engines of industry and war churning along in a devastating fashion.
Right now, of course, the world is witnessing yet another U.S. bombing campaign, the latest in a series that seems all too predictable (and futile), meant to teach the restless rebels of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and possibly even Iran a lesson when it comes to messing with the United States of America. As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and "We'll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass." You kill three soldiers of ours and we'll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn't really matter if they're soldiers or not), because" well, because we damn well can!
America's leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don't for a second think that they're going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it's run by appeasers.
Yes, America's presidents, its bombers-in-chief, are indeed appeasers. Of course, they think they're being strong when they're blowing distant people to bits, but their actions invariably showcase a distinctive kind of weakness. They eternally seek to appease the military-industrial-congressional complex, aka the national (in)security state, a complex state-within-a-state with an unappeasable hunger for power, profit, and ever more destruction. They fail and fail and fail again in the Middle East, yet they're incapable of not ordering more bombing, more droning, more killing there. Think of them as being possessed by a monomania for war akin to my urge to play with toy soldiers. The key difference? When I played at war, I was a wet-behind-the-ears 10 year old.
The Rockets' Red Glare, the Bombs Bursting in Air
No technology may be more all-American than bombs and bombers and no military doctrine more American than the urge to attain "peace" through massive firepower. In World War II and subsequent wars, the essential U.S. approach could be summarized in five words: mass production enabling mass destruction.
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