Norman Solomon, Aljazeera America - When the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, began this month by issuing a farewell report on U.S. military strategy, the gist was hardly big news. “Dempsey to Pentagon: Prepare for the Never-Ending War” read the headline on the cover page of the National Journal.
The “war on terror” now looks so endless that no one speculates anymore about when it might conclude. “This war, like all wars, must end,” President Barack Obama declared in a major speech more than two years ago. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” But midway through 2015, this war seems as interminable as ever.
In the process, Washington has blazed trails for cross-border impunity. The U.S. government’s latest expression of contempt for international law is its full support for the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia that has been bombing Yemen since late March. (Other countries deploying jets for the airstrikes are Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan and United Arab Emirates.)
At the end of last month, Human Rights Watch criticized the air assaults in a report that cited “numerous civilian deaths and injuries.” Days later, the Associated Press reported, “a massive airstrike” by the coalition killed more than 45 civilians and wounded over 50 others on June 6 in a suburban marketplace near the Yemeni city of Aden.
The Obama administration has made America a powerful role model for impunity, with unapologetic violations of international law that continue to fly drones and missiles across borders into half a dozen countries....
The longer it has persisted, the more America’s ongoing warfare has relied on above-it-all technologies that make war seem less consequential to people back home. Scantily reported and largely shrouded in mystery, U.S. missile strikes — whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Yemen — are apt to sound much more anodyne than boots on the ground...
While the automation of Uncle Sam’s killing-at-a-distance has sharply reduced American casualties, it has increasingly rendered the U.S. war path as the main avenue for pursuing its goals. And the nation’s top leaders, as well as the military contractors that profit from this tendency, appear to like it that way...
Five years ago, President Obama donned a bomber jacket in Afghanistan and proclaimed to American troops at Bagram Air Base that “the United States of America does not quit once it starts on something.” Today, Obama is America’s top normalizer of perpetual war — a tragic course enabled most of all by his partisan supporters...
It does not have to be this way. America need not propagate what Martin Luther King Jr. aptly called “the madness of militarism.” But to turn away from perpetual war, many people will first need to overcome party loyalties and summon the kind of resolve that King showed in challenging the tragic folly of war policies coming from a Democrat in the White House.
1 comment:
Bush and BushII started the wars in Iraq so save Saudi interests. They were Republicans.
Afghanistan was started by Afghanistan. All Al Qaeda captured should never have been taken to Cuba. They should all be dead. That, with vengeance on the Taliban for their hospitality, should have been the end of it.
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