maandag 27 november 2017

Tom Engelhardt 265

November 26, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Putting the "War" in the "War on Terror"
Consider the latest news from America's war zones, still spreading across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  The U.S. military is now reportedly building up its troop strength (mostly Special Operations forces) in Somalia. Their number has already doubled, reaching 500, while U.S. airstrikes are increasing against al-Shabab, the well-entrenched Islamist terror outfit in that country.  We're talking about the largest concentration of American troops in Somalia since the infamous Black Hawk Down debacle of almost a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, U.S. troop numbers (now considered a “secret”) are rising into the 14,000-16,000 range with at least 3,000 new troops recently sent in by the Pentagon. U.S. air strikes there are also on the rise.  Recently, American B-52s (the bomber of choice of the Vietnam War) and the latest F-22 jet fighters have been loosedfor the first time in what may be a “prolonged” campaign against suspected Taliban opium "factories."  At the same time, even though the Pentagon claims ISIS has been defeated in Syria, unknown numbers of American troops will remain there anyway.  (In these years, militarily speaking, the U.S. always arrives, but never leaves.)  In fact, as foreign policy expert Micah Zenko noted recently, in the past few months the numbers of U.S. military personnel across the Middle East (excluding both Afghanistan and Somalia) have gone from 40,000 to 54,000, a jump of 33%.

Sixteen years after the 9/11 attacks, it’s obvious enough that this is a pattern, just not one that gets significant attention here.  America’s wars go on and on.  Tactics vary modestly.  Troop strength rises and ebbs, only to rise again. The air war similarly ebbs and then escalates again.  For those in charge of American policy in that ever-vaster region of conflict, the options always seem the same.  Nothing is imaginable but more (or a little less) of what’s been tried for the last decade and a half. No less important, there is remarkably little discussion of this phenomenon in the U.S.  Since the vast surge of opposition to the coming invasion of Iraq faded and died out with the taking of Baghdad, protests against, resistance to, or even serious critiques of America’s twenty-first-century wars have been at best minimalist. By now, this has become something like the modern American way. That those conflicts add up to an ongoing disaster with a staggering price tag seems to matter not at all.

Logically, this should be the definition of brain dead, and yet the news of the latest bombing campaigns against the growing Taliban opium trade in Afghanistan or al-Shabab's horror show in Somalia remains largely back-page stuff. Who cares? What could possibly go wrong?

Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Army Major Danny Sjursen, author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, offers an answer of his own as he looks back at September 12, 2001, and considers the true missed opportunities of that moment. Tom
What If? 
An Alternative Strategy for 9/12/2001 
By Danny Sjursen
“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”
-- Thucydides
You’ve heard the platitude that hindsight is 20/20. It’s true enough and, though I’ve been a regular skeptic about what policymakers used to call the Global War on Terror, it’s always easier to poke holes in the past than to say what you would have done. My conservative father was the first to ask me what exactly I would have suggested on September 12, 2001, and he’s pressed me to write this article for years. The supposed rub is this: under the pressure of that attack and the burden of presidential responsibility, even “liberals” -- like me, I guess -- would have made much the same decisions as George W. Bush and company.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...