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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As you know, in return for a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), we've been offering signed, personalized copies of Andrew Bacevich's groundbreaking new book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.  Many thanks to those of you who already contributed. Your books will be in the mail soon and your donations really do help keep us chugging along! If you meant to get a copy and haven't yet, the offer is only open until Sunday, so check out our donation page soon for the details. Tom]  

At the moment, there are a maximum of 3,870 U.S. military personnel (or 7,740 actual boots on the ground) in Iraq supporting the war against the Islamic State.  That’s the “official cap” imposed by the Obama administration, because everyone knows that the president and his top officials are eager to end American wars in the Middle East, not expand them.  Of course, that number doesn’t include the other 1,130 American military types (or 2,260 boots) -- give or take we don’t know how many -- who just happen to be there on what’s called... er, um... “temporary deployments,” or are the result of overlap from rotating deployments, but add up to perhaps 5,000 trainers and advisers, or maybe, for all we know, more, including 200 Special Operations forces whose numbers are officially acknowledged by no one but mentioned in press reports.  And naturally that 5,000 figure doesn’t include the American private contractors also flowing into Iraq in growing numbers to support the U.S. military because everyone knows that they aren’t either troops or boots on the ground and so don’t get counted.  Those are the rules.

Do keep in mind that this time around the whole American on-the-ground operation couldn’t be more limited.  Though the numbers of U.S. trainers, advisers, and Special Ops types continue to creep up, they are, at least, helping the Iraqi military reconstitute itself on Iraqi bases.  In other words, this round of Washington's Iraq wars bears no relation to the last one (2003-2011), when the Pentagon had its private contractors build hundreds of U.S. bases, ranging in size from American towns to tiny combat outposts.  This time, the U.S. military has no bases of its own, not a single one... er, um... at least it didn’t until recently when an American Marine, a specialist in firing field artillery, died in an Islamic State rocket attack on what turned out to be an all-American Marine outpost, Fire Base Bell, in the northern part of the country.  The artillery operations he was involved in supporting the Iraqi army in its (stalled) drive on the country’s second largest city, Mosul, are not, however, “combat operations” because it's well established that no American troops, Special Ops units possibly excepted, are in combat in that country (or Syria).  In fact, U.S. officials point out that artillery doesn’t really count as combat.  It’s more like U.S. air operations against the Islamic State except... er, um... it takes place on the ground.

And by the way, according to Nancy Youssef of the Daily Beast, the U.S. actually has two bases in Iraq (the other in al-Anbar Province) and is planning to add more in the future, but these will most certainly not be old-style “fire bases.”  In fact, the one where that Marine died has already been renamed the Kara Soar Counter Fire Complex and it seems that any future... er, um... post established in Iraq will also be a “counter fire complex,” not a base, and will only engage in air-strike-style operations on or just above the... um... ground.  And the reason for that has nothing to do with the possible reaction of Americans to the new realities of Iraq. As Youssef points out, it's the fault of the touchy Iraqis:  “The new name notably did not include the word ‘base,’ as some Iraqis fear the return of any U.S. footprint that resembles the eight-year war that began with the 2003 invasion.”

In this spirit of renaming, the Pentagon and the Obama administration follow in a proud American linguistic tradition. As the Bush administration was completing its invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in April 2003, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was planning to build at least four major installations for the future garrisoning of that country, though “permanent bases” was a phrase being avoided at all costs.  ("[T]here will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops," wrote the Times reporters.)  At the Pentagon, these massive outposts were instead labeled “enduring camps."  And tradition matters. So all is well in... er, um... that country in the Fertile Crescent.  You know the one I mean.   

It’s true that, in these years, American English has taken some casualties, but the good news is that none of these have happened “in combat.”  Just think of them as necessary adjustments to an increasingly difficult-to-describe world, one that TomDispatch regular retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore catches to a T in today's post on this country’s post-9/11 war of words. Tom

What’s the Meaning of Failure?
A Dictionary of Euphemisms for Imperial Decline
By William J. Astore

The dishonesty of words illustrates the dishonesty of America’s wars. 

Since 9/11, can there be any doubt that the public has become numb to the euphemisms that regularly accompany U.S. troops, drones, and CIA operatives into Washington’s imperial conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa?  Such euphemisms are meant to take the sting out of America’s wars back home.  Many of these words and phrases are already so well known and well worn that no one thinks twice about them anymore.

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There had never been a “concession” statement like it.  It was short, to the point, and in addition to the usual accusations of “lyin’” leveled at Ted Cruz, compared his victorious measures to the ruse the Greeks used to destroy Troy, accused him of outright illegal acts, as well as election thievery, and claimed that even the label “puppet” was too kind by half.  Here’s how that 157-word release began -- and I know at this point you won’t be shocked to learn that I’m quoting from the statement the Trump campaign put out after The Donald was stomped in Wisconsin: “Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again. Lyin' Ted Cruz had the Governor of Wisconsin, many conservative talk radio show hosts, and the entire party apparatus behind him. Not only was he propelled by the anti-Trump Super PAC's spending countless millions of dollars on false advertising against Mr. Trump, but he was coordinating with his own Super PACs (which is illegal) who totally control him. Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet -- he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump.”

Admittedly, the full statement lacked words like “vampire,” “pimp,” and “zombie,” but in its relative restraint the Trump campaign was undoubtedly reserving its fire for any election losses still to come on the road to the Big Smash-Up (that used to be called “the Republican convention”). It’s also true that, despite the expectations of New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz, Trump has not yet filed a suit against the state of Wisconsin and its voters for his loss there.  But if you think we can make it through this “election” season without recourse to the experts (and by that I naturally mean expert satirists, humorists, and cartoonists), then you truly are a -- in the Trumpian tradition of insult -- mad person or, actually, a zombie!  Not having a satirist, cartoonist, or humorist in sight, TomDispatch has gone in another direction today in trying to grasp the essence of what we’re watching and make a little sense of it. Thanks to TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan, it’s turning to a different set of experts who know something special about the boundaries of the All-Absorbing Self and others: children. So sit back in that swing, give yourself a push, and listen up. Tom

Make Trump Great Again!
Taking The Donald to Toddler Town
By Frida Berrigan

So far, I’ve dealt with Donald Trump’s bid for the White House as performance art: a clever, full-body, self-marketing scheme in the fashion of actor Joaquin Phoenix restyling himself as a hip hop artist to promote his mockumentary I’m Still Here. You remember that odd media moment from a few years back, right? When the handsome star of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line grew a huge beard and rapped incoherently on David Letterman? I can’t be the only one, can I?

So I keep waiting for the Trump-presidential-run punch line.  I mean, what is his endless campaign that’s conquered America’s and even the world’s attention 24/7 really selling: the new Trumptopian private community on the Moon (or in Burma)?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: My thanks for your generosity in sending in contributions for Adam Hochschild's superb new book on Americans in the Spanish Civil War and Andrew Bacevich's groundbreaking look at this country's most recent set of unending conflicts, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. You really do help keep this website rolling along!  Please note that the Hochschild book, no longer on offer, will be in the mail to all those who contributed in the next few days.  For a donation of $100 or more ($125 for anyone living outside the U.S.), you can, however, still get a signed, personalized copy of the Bacevich, which (because of his book tour) will not be in the mail to donors until next weekend.  Check our donation page for the details.  Tom]

Late last year, I spent some time digging into the Pentagon’s “reconstruction” efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries it invaded in 2001 and 2003 in tandem with a chosen crew of warrior corporations. As a story of fabled American can-do in distant lands, both proved genuinely dismal no-can-do tales, from roads built (that instantly started crumbling) to police academies constructed (that proved to be health hazards) to prisons begun (that were never finished) to schools constructed (that remained uncompleted) to small arms transfers (that were “lost” in transit) to armies built, trained, and equipped for stunning sums (that collapsed).  It was as if nothing the Pentagon touched turned to anything but dross (including the never-ending wars it fought).  All of it added up to what I then labeled a massive “$cam” with American taxpayer money lost in amounts that staggered the imagination.

All of that came rushing back as I read TomDispatch regular William Hartung’s latest post on “waste” at the Pentagon.  It didn’t just happen in Kabul and Baghdad; it’s been going on right here in the good old USA for, as Hartung recounts, the last five decades.  There’s only one difference I can see: in Kabul, Baghdad, or any other capital in the Greater Middle East and Africa, if we saw far smaller versions of such “waste” indulged in by the elites of those countries, we would call it “corruption” without blinking.  So here’s my little suggestion, as you read Hartung: think about just how deeply what once would have been considered a Third World-style of corruption is buried in the very heart of our system and in the way of life of the military-industrial complex.  By now, President Dwight Eisenhower must be tossing and turning in his grave. Tom

How Not to Audit the Pentagon
Five Decades Later, the Military Waste Machine Is Running Full Speed Ahead
By William D. Hartung

From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.

Keep in mind that the above examples are just the tip of the tip of a titanic iceberg of military waste.  In a recent report I did for the Center for International Policy, I identified 27 recent examples of such wasteful spending totaling over $33 billion.  And that was no more than a sampling of everyday life in the twenty-first-century world of the Pentagon.

The staggering persistence and profusion of such cases suggests that it’s time to rethink what exactly they represent.  Far from being aberrations in need of correction to make the Pentagon run more efficiently, wasting vast sums of taxpayer dollars should be seen as a way of life for the Department of Defense.  And with that in mind, let’s take a little tour through the highlights of Pentagon waste from the 1960s to the present.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Right now, you can still get signed, personalized copies of the new books of two remarkable, bestselling authors at this website.  In return for a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can choose either Andrew Bacevich’s spectacular book America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History or Adam Hochschild’s riveting new work on the war that began the most devastating conflict in history, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.  (Note, however, that the offer on Hochschild’s book will end this Saturday morning.)  Visit the recent TomDispatch pieces by Bacevich and Hochschild to get a sense of their new books.  Worth Fighting For, written by today’s author, ex-Army Ranger Rory Fanning, remains on offer as well.  Check out our donation page for the details on all of them.  A final note: Adam Hochschild has been on book tour for nearly two weeks.  For those of you who already contributed, copies of his book will be in the mail early next week.  Thanks for your patience!  Tom]

The third time around, the Pentagon evidently wants to do it right -- truly right -- this time.  What other explanation could there be for dispatching 12 generals to Iraq (one for every 416 American troops estimated to be on the ground in that country, according to Nancy Youssef of the Daily Beast).  And keep in mind that those 12 don’t include the generals and admirals overseeing the air war, naval support, or other aspects of the campaign against the Islamic State from elsewhere in the Middle East or back in the U.S., nor do they include generals from allied forces like those of Australia and Great Britain also in Iraq.  Youssef offers a “conservative” count of 21 “flag officers,” including allies, now in that country to oversee the war there. Among other things, they are undoubtedly responsible for ensuring the success of the major goal proclaimed by both Washington and Baghdad for 2016: an offensive to retake the country’s second largest city, Mosul. Only weeks ago, it got off to a rousing start when the Iraqi army recaptured a few obscure villages on the road to that city.  Soon after, however, the offensive reportedly ground to a dispiriting halt when parts of the American-retrained and rearmed Iraqi Army (which had collapsed in June 2014 in the face of far smaller numbers of far more determined Islamic State militants) began to crumble again, amid mass desertions.

In the meantime, in both Iraq and Syria, U.S. operations seem to be on an inexorable mission-creep upward, with ever more new troops and special ops types heading for those countries in a generally under-the-radar manner, assumedly with the objective of someday justifying the number of generals awaiting them there. Somewhere in a top-heavy Pentagon, there surely must be an office of déjà vu all over again, mustn’t there?  (And talking about déjà vu, last week the U.S. launched yet another air strike in Somalia, supposedly knocking off yet another leader of al-Shabab, the indigenous terror movement. If you could win a war by repeatedly knocking off the leaders of such movements, the U.S. would by now be the greatest victor in the history of warfare.)

Meanwhile in Afghanistan... but do I really have to tell you about the ground taken by the resurgent Taliban in the last year, the arrival of ISIS in that country, the halting (yet again) of withdrawal plans for U.S. forces almost 15 years into the second American war there, or other tales from the crypt of this country's never-ending wars?  I think not.  Even if you haven’t read the latest news, you can guess, can’t you?

And this, of course, is exactly the repetitive world of war (and failure) into which the young, especially in America’s poorest high schools, are being recruited, even if they don’t know it, via JROTC.  It's a Pentagon-funded program that promises to pave the way for your future college education, give meaning to your life, and send you to exotic lands, while ensuring that the country’s all-volunteer military never lacks for new troops to dispatch to old (verging on ancient) conflicts. As Ann Jones has written, “It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is ‘youth development program.’” So let’s offer thanks for small favors when someone -- in this case, ex-Army Ranger and TomDispatch regular Rory Fanning (author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America) -- feels the urge to do something about that massive, militarized propaganda effort in our schools.  In my book, Fanning is the equivalent of any 12 of our generals and we need more like him both in those schools and in our country. Tom   

The Wars in Our Schools
An Ex-Army Ranger Finds a New Mission
By Rory Fanning

Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.

It took me a while to begin to understand why I do this every year, or for that matter why for the last decade since I left the military I’ve continued to inflict other types of pain on myself with such unnerving regularity. Most days, for instance, I lift weights at the gym to the point of crippling exhaustion. On summer nights, I sometimes swim out alone as far as I can through mats of hairy algae into the black water of Lake Michigan in search of what I can only describe as a feeling of falling.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Here’s a special offer for you today.  A TD favorite, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich, has just published America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, a stunning new book on Washington’s roiling set of conflicts in the Middle East from 1980 to late last night. I’ve been following the subject at TD for years and I still was repeatedly surprised by what he covers and makes sense of. For a limited period, in return for a $100 contribution ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book and believe me, if you want to understand our screwed-up world, it’s one you’ll want to read. Check our donation page for the details. Tom]

It was a large banner and its message was clear.  It read: “Mission Accomplished,” and no, I don’t mean the classic “mission accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln under which, on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush proudly proclaimed (to the derision of critics ever since) that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”  I’m actually referring to a September 1982 banner with those same two words (and an added “farewell” below them) displayed on a landing craft picking up the last Marines sent ashore in Beirut, Lebanon, to be, as President Ronald Reagan put it when they arrived the previous August, “what Marines have been for more than 200 years -- peace-makers.”  Of course, when Bush co-piloted an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and made his now-classic statement, major combat had barely begun in Iraq (and it has yet to end) -- nor was it peace that came to Beirut in September 1982: infamously, the following year 241 Marines would die there in a single day, thanks to a suicide bomber.

“Not for the last time,” writes Andrew Bacevich in his monumental new work, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, “the claim proved to be illusory.”  Indeed, one of the grim and eerie wonders of his book is the way in which just about every wrongheaded thing Washington did in that region in the 14-plus years since 9/11 had its surprising precursor in the two decades of American war there before the World Trade Center towers came down.  U.S. military trainers and advisers, for example, failed (as they later would in Iraq and Afghanistan) to successfully build armies, starting with the Lebanese one; Bush’s “preventive war” had its predecessor in a Reagan directive called (ominously enough given what was to come) “combating terrorism”; Washington’s obsessive belief of recent years that problems in the region could be solved by what Andrew Cockburn has called the “kingpin strategy” -- the urge to dismantle terror organizations by taking out their leadership via drones or special operations raids -- had its precursor in “decapitation” operations against Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid with similar resulting mayhem.  The belief that “an additional increment of combat power might turn around a failing endeavor” -- call it a “surge,” if you will -- had its Iraq and Afghan pretrial run in Somalia in 1993.  And above all, of course, there was Washington’s unquenchable post-1980 urge to intervene, military first, in a decisive way throughout the region, which, as Bacevich writes, only “produced conditions conducive to further violence and further disorder,” and if that isn’t the repetitive history of America’s failed post-2001 wars in a nutshell, what is?

As it happened, the effects of such actions from 1980 on were felt not just in the Greater Middle East and Africa, but in the United States, too.  There, as Bacevich writes today, war became a blank-check activity for a White House no longer either checked (in any sense) or balanced by Congress.  Think of it as another sad tale of a surge (or do I mean a decapitation?) that went wrong. Tom

Writing a Blank Check on War for the President
How the United States Became a Prisoner of War and Congress Went MIA
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land -- otherwise considered sacrosanct -- becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.

The examples are legion.  During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote. 

More often than not, the passing of the emergency induces second thoughts and even remorse. The further into the past a particular war recedes, the more dubious the wartime arguments for violating the Constitution appear. Americans thereby take comfort in the “lessons learned” that will presumably prohibit any future recurrence of such folly.

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