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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This is the last TomDispatch post of 2017.  We’ll be back on January 4, 2018, hoping against hope for a better year.  And this is, of course, my last chance in 2017 to remind all of you that, in this season of giving, TomDispatch is always deeply appreciative of anything you’re willing to donate. Let me thank all of you who have already given so generously to this site during our end-of-year drive, ensuring that we’ll be here, doing our damnedest, next year. Anyone who hasn’t given but has the urge to do so, believe me, we still need the money. It costs to keep this site running with top-notch analysis three times a week! So if you missed it, check out my 2017 letter to subscribers and then visit our donation page where, for $100 ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can choose a signed, personalized copy of one of our striking lineup of Dispatch Books and others by some of your favorite TD authors. You'll also receive my eternal thanks for helping keep this site afloat in tough times. Tom]

Who Cares?
Not Them, Not It, Not Him, Not (Evidently) Us
By Tom Engelhardt

Let’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t.

As for it -- Earth -- the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it.  And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him -- and I mean, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who reputedly has a void where the normal quotient of human empathy might be -- don’t give it a second’s thought.  Beyond himself, his businesses, and possibly (just possibly) his family, he clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about us or, for that matter, what happens to anyone after he departs this planet.

As for us, the rest of us here in the United States at least, we already know something about the nature of our caring.  A Yale study released last March indicated that 70% of us -- a surprising but still less than overwhelming number (given the by-now-well-established apocalyptic dangers involved) -- believe that global warming is actually occurring.  Less than half of us, however, expect to be personally harmed by it.  So, to quote the eminently quotable Alfred E. Newman, "What, me worry?"

Tell that, by the way, to the inhabitants of Ojai and other southern California hotspots -- infernos, actually -- being reduced to cinders this December, a month that not so long ago wasn’t significant when it came to fires in that state.  But such blazes should have been no surprise, thanks to the way fire seasons are lengthening on this warming planet.  A burning December is simply part of what the governor of California, on surveying the fire damage recently, dubbed “the new normal” -- just as ever more powerful Atlantic hurricanes, growing increasingly fierce as they pass over the warming waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on their way to batter the United States, are likely to be another new normal of our American world. 

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In a Washington politically riven in ways not seen since the pre-Civil War era, take hope.  Despite everything you’ve read, bipartisanship is not dead. On one issue, congressional Democrats and Republicans, as well as Donald Trump, all speak with a single resounding voice, with, in fact, unmatched unanimity and fervor as they stretch hands across the aisle in a spirit of cooperation. Perhaps you’ve already guessed, but I’m referring to the Pentagon budget. By staggering majorities, both houses of Congress just passed an almost $700 billion defense bill, more money than even President Trump had requested and he’s already happily signed it.

And Americans generally seem to partake of the same spirit. After all, while esteem for other American institutions like, uh, Congress has fallen radically in these years, the U.S. military hasn’t lost a step. Last June, for instance, Gallup’s pollsters found that public confidence in U.S. institutions generally had dropped to a dismal 32%, but a soaring 73% of Americans had the highest possible confidence in the military, which means that Donald Trump’s decision to surround himself with three generals as secretary of defense, White House chief of staff, and national security adviser was undoubtedly a popular one. In a similar vein, it’s striking that America’s war on terror, now entering its 17th dismal year and still expanding, and the military that wages it remain essentially beyond criticism or protest.  It hardly seems to matter that, in this century of constant warfare across significant parts of the planet, that military has yet to bring home a real victory of any sort.

Who cares? That military is, by now, a distinctly Teflon outfit to which no criticism sticks, even through it and the rest of the national security state swallow stunning amounts of taxpayer dollars as if there were no tomorrow, while the Pentagon experiences cost overruns of every kind for its weapons systems, has proven incapable of auditing itself (ever!), and recently couldn’t even account for 44,000 (yes, 44,000!) of its troops deployed somewhere in the imperium, though who knows where. No wonder Donald Trump, a man of no fixed beliefs (except about himself), but with a finely tuned sense of what might be popular with his base, has loosed that military from many of the already modest bounds within which it’s fought its largely losing wars of these last years, and seems to be leaving its generals (and the CIA) to do their escalatory damnedest from Afghanistan to Niger, Syria to Somalia.

With all of this in mind, as another year in which permanent war is the barely noticed background hum of American life, I asked TomDispatch regular U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad, to assess American war in 2017 and consider just where we’re headed. Tom

America’s Wars
Yet More of More of the Same?
By Danny Sjursen

I remember the day President Obama let me down. 

It was December 1, 2009, and as soon as the young president took the podium at West Point and -- calm and cool as ever -- announced a new troop surge in Afghanistan, I knew.  There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.  In that instant, George W. Bush’s wars had become Barack Obama’s. 

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a reminder that, in this traditional season of giving, despite the remarkable generosity of so many of you in response to my recent letter pleading for funds, TomDispatch still needs support as 2017 ends. It’s not complicated, really. We don’t have ads. We don’t have a paywall. You really are what keeps us going, which is why, twice a year, we plead for donations like this. Whatever you decide to give, it does matter when it comes to TD. So do, if the spirit moves you, check out our donation page (and the offers of signed, personalized books in return for contributions of at least $100 -- $125 if you live outside the United States). And for those of you who have already given, I just can’t thank you enough! Tom]

In June, an American Green Beret was reportedly strangled to death in Mali by U.S. Navy SEALs, allegedly in connection with a shadowy money-skimming scheme.  (The military is currently investigating.) In July, The Intercept, the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty International revealed that a drone base used by U.S. forces in Cameroon was also a site for illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings on the part of local forces. (The military is investigating.) In August, according to a blockbuster investigation by the Daily Beast, U.S. Special Operations forces took part in a massacre in which 10 Somali civilians were killed.  (The military is investigating.)  In October, four Special Operations soldiers were killed in murky circumstances during an ambush by militants in Niger.  (The military is investigating.)

This spate of questionable, scandalous, or even criminal activity involving U.S. forces in Africa should come as little surprise.  Over the last decade and a half, operations on that continent have been expanding and evolving at an exponential rate.  A token number of U.S. troops has grown into a cast of thousands now carrying out about 10 separate missions per day, ranging from training to combat operations, which are up 1,900% since last year alone.  U.S. commandos sent to that continent have jumped from 1% of special ops forces deployed overseas in 2006 to nearly 17% today, the highest total outside the Middle East.  There have also been numerous indications of U.S. forces behaving badly from one side of the continent to the other.  Few in the mainstream media or among those tasked with oversight of such operations have, however, taken any significant notice of this.

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the wake of the ambush in Niger.  More recently, Congressman Ted Lieu of the House Foreign Affairs Committee added, “From combating al-Shabaab in Somalia to Boko Haram in Nigeria, U.S. military personnel are deployed across the African continent with little public scrutiny or awareness.”  This attention deficit helped set the stage for the recent scandals that have forced lawmakers and the public to take some notice.

The situation of the U.S. military in Africa is, in some respects, not unlike that in California, where TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon begins her latest article.  There, climate-change-charged dry weather and unseasonably warm temperatures made the state a tinderbox that recently burst into a series of devastating wildfires.  The U.S. military has created its own tinderbox in Africa, where longtime expansion without oversight has led to a series of blazing scandals.  And all of this is just a small part of the larger story told by Gordon -- of a world filled with the dry underbrush of decades of failed U.S. policies and of a president with a penchant for setting fires.  Once, ignoble political calculations, futile strategies, ideological idiocy, and intellectual ineptitude provided flashpoints capable of sparking foreign policy failures, conflicts, or ruinous domestic policies.  Today, writes Gordon, the commander-in-chief functions as a one-man flamethrower, setting blazes the world over as a matter of whim and embracing the inferno as an end in itself. Nick Turse

The President Plays with Matches
And the Whole World Burns
By Rebecca Gordon

“I’ve just heard that my family home near Carpenteria is literally in flames at this moment,” a friend told me recently. She was particularly worried, she said, because “my mom has MS. She and my dad got the call to evacuate after midnight last night. They were able to grab a few photos, my sister’s childhood teddy bear, and the dog. That’s it. That’s all that’s left.”

My friend’s parents are among the thousands of victims of the 240,000-acre Thomas fire, one of California’s spate of late-season wildfires. Stoked by 80-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds, plenty of dry fuel, and 8% humidity, such fires are devouring huge swaths of southern California from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. Months of dry weather and unseasonably warm temperatures have turned the southern part of the state into a tinderbox.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve come to that moment again.  You know, the one at year's end when I ask all of you for money to keep this website afloat.  It’s hell to do (and no fun to read I’m sure), but your contributions do truly keep us going.  I’ve written an end-of-year funding letter to all TomDispatch subscribers that begins this way: “If you just heard a deep sigh, that was me.  Right now, if we're not in the world from hell, then where the hell are we?  You know perfectly well what I think about it all, as I write weekly at TomDispatch on that president, those wars, those plutocrats, and the environmental crisis that's going to make our grandchildren's world, the one I will have long left, a potential nightmare of the first order.”  It includes, of course, the necessary plea for donations.  If you’re not a TD subscriber but visit this site regularly, you can click here to read my whole letter.  Or you can just go directly to the TD donation page and contribute if the mood strikes you.  In return for a $100 donation -- $125 if you live outside the U.S. -- you can choose a signed, personalized copy of any volume from a selection of Dispatch Books and others as a token of our thanks.  Tom]

Ambassadors of the traditional kind?  Who needs them?  Diplomats?  What a waste!  The State Department?  Why bother?  Its budget is to be slashed and its senior officials are leaving in droves ever since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.  Under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, hiring is frozen, which means those officials are generally not being replaced.  (Buyouts of $25,000 are being offered to get yet more of them to jump ship.)  Dozens of key positions have gone unfilled, while the secretary of state reportedly focuses not on global diplomacy or what, in another age, was called “foreign policy,” but on his reorganization (downsizing) of the department and evidently little else.  Across the planet, starting with the A’s (Australia), American embassies lack ambassadors, including South Korea, a country that has been a focus of the Trump administration.  Similarly, at the time of the president’s inflammatory Jerusalem announcement, the U.S. had no ambassadors yet in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, among other Middle Eastern states.  It’s quite a tale and it’s being covered as the news story it certainly is.

All of this could be seen, however, not just as the foibles of one president surrounded by “his” generals, but as the culmination of a post-9/11 process in which American policymaking has increasingly been militarized.  In this context, as the State Department shrinks, don’t think this country has no ambassadors across the planet.   America’s Special Operations forces increasingly act as our “diplomats” globally, training and bolstering allies and attempting to undermine enemies more or less everywhere.  We’ve never seen anything like it and yet, unlike the slashing of the diplomatic corps, it’s a story barely noted in the mainstream. Nick Turse has, however, been covering it for TomDispatch in a groundbreaking way since 2011.  In these years, he’s focused on what should have been seen as one of the major developments of our era: the phenomenal growth and historically unprecedented deployment of this country’s special operators in an atmosphere of permanent war in Washington. 

In the post-9/11 years, the once “elite” units of the U.S. military, perhaps a few thousand Green Berets and other personnel, have become a force of approximately 70,000.  In other words, that secretive crew cocooned inside the U.S. military has grown as large as or larger than the militaries of countries such as Argentina, Canada, Chile, Croatia, South Africa, or Sweden.  Now, imagine that those Special Operations forces, as Turse has again been reporting for years, are not only being dispatched to more countries annually than ever before, but to more countries than any nation has ever deployed its military personnel to. Period. 

Shouldn’t that be a humongous story?  We’re talking, as Turse points out today, about the deployment of special ops teams or personnel to 149 of the 190 (or so) nations on this planet in 2017. You can, of course, find articles about our special operators in the media, but over the years they’ve generally tended to read like so many publicity releases for such forces. The story of how our special operators came to be our “diplomats” of choice and the spearhead for American foreign policy and how expanding wars and spreading terror movements were the apparent result of such moves has yet to be told, except at places like TomDispatch. Tom

Donald Trump’s First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops
Elite Commandos Deployed to 149 Countries in 2017
By Nick Turse

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.

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Sometimes I wonder what school I went to. I mean, I know perfectly well. I attended a place I never wanted to go: Yale.  But when I was 17 years old, my parents -- and a familial urge to be upwardly mobile -- more than overwhelmed my personal and private desire to go elsewhere. So, in 1962, I ended up at that all-male college in New Haven, Connecticut, and, despite the education I received, much of which I genuinely enjoyed, I’ve regretted it ever since. It was that school’s particular version of all-maleness that did me in -- an elite, powerful style of masculinity that I found painful and eerily shameful even then (though men, or boys pretending to be men, didn’t admit to such feelings in those years or, until recently, in these).

I’ll never forget the bravado, the grim over-the-top bragging about what you had done to women. I remember, for instance, my roommate, a rare working-class kid at Yale in those years who had absorbed the ethos of the place, returning from spring break and shouting -- I was in our room on maybe the third floor and could still hear him from the courtyard of our quad -- that he had done it, lost his virginity, including other grim details of his conquest.  The bragging never seemed to end. I was, in those years, unbearably shy when it came to sex, or perhaps to my own lack of experience and pure ignorance about it, and repelled by the version of it that seemed to be the essence of that world of boys being oh-so-male.  My only recourse -- the only one I could at least imagine then -- was to fall into an expressionless silence when the braggadocio began until I could figure out an excuse to leave the room.  This, however, proved to be another kind of disaster, since it was more than once mistaken for experience, which meant, for instance, that my roommate would later pull me aside and confess that the “conquest” he had just spent the last day bragging about had actually been a total horror show. 

I knew a little of his history before he blew his brains out 40-odd years later and he had, by then, turned into a Roy Moore-style predator, which I always blamed on the world we had both emerged from at Yale.  I’ve never forgotten its style of masculinity or, in a way, recovered from it -- from the feeling, that is, that I wasn’t a man but just some sort of sorry failure.

While I did, in the end, go on to graduate school, I evidently didn’t go to the one that any number of the men of my generation and after seem to have attended -- you know, the one that, as TomDispatch regular Ann Jones explains today, taught you how “manly” and perfectly appropriate it was to enter a bathroom while a woman was in the next room and reappear naked to make grotesque sexual demands.

All I know is that now it’s somewhat easier, thanks to the bursting dam of news about the grotesque (and grotesquely repetitive) experiences that women have had with male predators, to see what that world of supposed maleness was all about and why it felt so shameful to me, even if I then thought that the fault, the lack, was all mine. We are now, it seems, in a different moment.  However, let’s remember that, as Jones suggests today, sometimes such moments -- take, for instance, that of the first black president of the United States -- aren’t followed by a kind of enlightenment but by the angriest of backlashes. Tom

The Fempire Strikes Back
#MeToo
By Ann Jones

First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that’s bubbled in the back of my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he’s been for half a century. But I’m stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.

Toback could have been picked up by New York’s Finest when he hit on me in or around 1972.  But I didn’t call the cops, knowing it would come to nothing.  Nor did I tell our mutual employer, the City College of the City University of New York. I had no doubt about which one of us our male bosses would believe. I had already been labeled an agitator for campaigning to add a program in women’s studies to the curriculum. Besides, to any normal person, the story of what happened would sound too inconsequential to seem anything but ridiculous: not a crime but a farce.

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