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They are unending. There’s no way to keep up, much less respond effectively, and it almost goes without saying that they are never to be taken back, corrected, or amended in any way. Call them false claims, lies, untruths, misstatements, whatever you want, but they are what comes out of his mouth just about anytime he opens it. Take, for instance, that moment as 2018 ended when, in a blacked-out plane, he landed at al-Asad Air Base in Iraq for a three-hour presidential visit with the troops. It was there that he swore (as he had before) that he had won those troops a 10% pay raise for 2019 and that, to do so, he had fought it out in the trenches with unnamed military officials. (“They said, you know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3%. We could make it 2%. We could make it 4%.’ I said, ‘No. Make it 10%. Make it more than 10%.’”) He insisted as well that they hadn’t had a raise, not just of such a monumental sort but of any kind, in “more than 10 years.” As it happens, what were once known as the facts went like this: those troops last received a pay raise -- of 2.4% -- in 2018 (and every year before that for three decades); the 2019 pay raise is for 2.6%, not 10%; and those unnamed military officials evidently won!

For any half-normal president that would have been the trifecta: three outlandish falsehoods in a single try, but for Donald Trump it was just the modest, everyday demonstration of his remarkable ability to adjust reality to his needs, desires, and fantasies, and (as Jean-Luc Picard would once have said) “Make it so”! After all, for the man who, according to Washington Post fact-checkers, managed to make almost 6,000 “false and misleading claims” in 2018 alone, more than 15 a day and almost triple his record-setting pace of the previous year, that was nothing. Land him at al-Asad again in the middle of the night and don’t for a second think he couldn’t do better.

And maybe his example should free us up. After all, only the other day I was myself advising The Donald that, while the government is partially shut, he should begin building a 10-foot “Great Wall” around the White House, give himself a 10% pay raise, make Ivanka his secretary of defense, and send Jared to Afghanistan to evaluate the situation there -- and if you don’t believe that, let me tell you another one. Or, alternatively, I might suggest that you check out TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s account of what it means to live in a world in which the presidential “credibility gap” that was the heart and soul of the long-gone Vietnam era is now an artifact of Mesopotamian history amid the "incredibility chasm" of the present moment. Tom

A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm
Life in the United States of Trump
By Rebecca Gordon

In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for one of them, the two engage in a bit of epistemological banter. Jesus allows that his work is about telling the truth and Pilate responds with his show-stopping query: “What is truth?”

Pilate’s retort is probably not the first example in history of a powerful ruler challenging the very possibility that some things might be true and others lies, but it’s certainly one of the best known. As the tale continues, the Gospel of John proceeds to impose its own political truth on the narrative. It describes an interaction that, according to historians, is almost certainly a piece of fiction: Pilate offers an angry crowd assembled at his front door a choice: he will free either Jesus or a man named Barabbas. The loser will be crucified.

“Now,” John tells us, “Barabbas had taken part in an uprising” against the Romans. When the crowd chooses to save him, John condemns them for preferring such a rebel over the man who told the “truth” -- the revolutionary zealot, that is, over the Messiah.

What, indeed, is truth? As Pilate implies and John’s tale suggests, it seems to depend on who’s telling the story -- and whose story we choose to believe. Could truth, in other words, just be a matter of opinion?

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As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse reminds us today, the United States remains an imperial military presence unlike any other -- not just in this moment but in the history of empire. Never has a single country had so many military bases on so many parts of Planet Earth. Consider that a striking fact of 2019, as it was, say, of the 1950s or the post-Cold-War 1990s. How many such bases? As Turse makes clear, no one really knows, possibly not even the Pentagon. And more curious yet, that vast global infrastructure, that “empire of bases” (in Chalmers Johnson’s eloquent phrase), is hardly noticed in what, since 9/11, has been known as “the homeland.” Few here think much about those global garrisons (although hundreds of thousands of Americans have in recent years been deployed to them); the media that cover every presidential tweet as if it were a missive from the emperor almost never mention them, much less report on them; and no one -- Turse and a few scholars aside -- seems to have the slightest interest in counting them up, much less considering their cost or even the global role they’ve been playing all these years. In domestic terms, they are essentially missing in action, which means a vision of how the United States has positioned itself on this planet is missing in action as well.

With that in mind, let’s acknowledge something else in this strange moment of ours: while that massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains firmly in place, American imperial power is increasingly another matter. It should be clear enough by now that, despite The Donald’s recent dark-of-night selfie drop-in on American troops at al-Assad Air Base in Iraq -- as CNN put it, “the dicey security situation still restrict[ed] Trump to a clandestine visit more than 15 years after the American invasion” -- he seems to be almost singlehandedly launching the process by which the American imperial system, built up over the last three-quarters of a century, could be dismantled. The Syrian withdrawal and possible Afghan drawdown of troops may just be straws in the wind -- but one day, what a wind that could turn out to be!

It’s obvious that the man who ran as the first declinist candidate for president, the only one willing to acknowledge in 2016 that America was no longer quite so “great,” seems intent, however blindly, on beginning that dismantling process. He clearly has an urge to tear down international institutions and dismiss the network of subservient allies Washington had carefully built up for decades to bolster its global power.

Still, don’t label him the dismantler-in-chief quite yet. In the end, Donald Trump may indeed prove to be the American equivalent of one of the mad emperors that helped take down the Roman empire -- a Queens-born Caligula. For the time being, however, think of him instead as an envoy for and a message from the unknown gods of the twenty-first century, a symptom of a process that has been going on just out of sight for years. After all, he bears no responsibility for the fact that the self-proclaimed greatest military power ever, in fighting post-9/11 wars without end, has found itself, despite that empire of bases, ever less able to impose its will militarily or otherwise on increasingly large parts of the planet. Tom

Bases, Bases, Everywhere...
Except in the Pentagon’s Report
By Nick Turse

The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, that Russia has called a terrorist hotbed (while floating the idea of jointly administering it with the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S. Marines joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S. officials claimed was the key not only to defeating ISIS, but also, according to General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, to countering “the malign activities that Iran and their various proxies and surrogates would like to pursue.” You know, that al-Tanf.

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, equipment at that base was already being inventoried for removal. And just like that, arguably the most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe) being struck from the Pentagon’s books -- except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the Pentagon’s books. Opened in 2015 and, until recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many military bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an acknowledged foreign outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the Pentagon’s official inventory of bases.

Officially, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 “sites,” spread across all 50 states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries. A total of 514 of these outposts are located overseas, according to the Pentagon’s worldwide property portfolio. Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent version of that portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure Report (BSR), doesn’t include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts are known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.

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[Note for TomDispatch readers: We’re back! Somehow, we’ve made it to 2019 and I just wanted to offer a special heartfelt thanks to every one of you who donated to this website with such striking generosity as last year ended! You’ve ensured that, whatever happens this year, as long as I can stagger on, TomDispatch will be here for its 17th year -- no small thing when you think about it. Tom]

Is Donald Trump an Asteroid?
Honestly, This Could Get a Lot Uglier
By Tom Engelhardt

Sixty-six million years ago, so the scientists tell us, an asteroid slammed into this planet. Landing on what’s now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, it gouged out a crater 150 kilometers wide and put so much soot and sulfur into the atmosphere that it created what was essentially a prolonged “nuclear winter.” During that time, among so many other species, large and small, the dinosaurs went down for the count. (Don’t, however, tell that to your local chicken, the closest living relative -- it’s now believed -- of Tyrannosaurus Rex.)

It took approximately 66 million years for humanity to evolve from lowly surviving mammals and, over the course of a recent century or two, teach itself how to replicate the remarkable destructive power of that long-gone asteroid in two different ways: via nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels. And if that isn’t an accomplishment for the species that likes to bill itself as the most intelligent ever to inhabit this planet, what is?

Talking about accomplishments: as humanity has armed itself ever more lethally, it has also transformed itself into the local equivalent of so many asteroids. Think, for instance, of that moment in the spring of 2003 when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and crew launched the invasion of Iraq with dreams of setting up a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East and beyond. By the time U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the burning and looting of the Iraqi capital had already begun, leaving the National Museum of Iraq trashed (gone were the tablets on which Hammurabi first had a code of laws inscribed) and the National Library of Baghdad, with its tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, in flames. (No such “asteroid” had hit that city since 1258, when Mongol warriors sacked it, destroying its many libraries and reputedly leaving the Tigris River running “black with ink” and red with blood.)

In truth, since 2003 the Greater Middle East has never stopped burning, as other militaries -- Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Russian, Saudi, Syrian, Turkish -- entered the fray, insurgent groups rose, terror movements spread, and the U.S. military never left. By now, the asteroidal nature of American acts in the region should be beyond question. Consider, for example, the sainted retired general and former secretary of defense, Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, the man who classically said of an Iraqi wedding party (including musicians) that his troops took out in 2004, “How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” Or consider that, in the very same year, Mattis and the 1st Marine Division he commanded had just such an impact on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, leaving more than 75% of it in rubble.

Or focus for a moment on the destruction caused by some combination of U.S. air power, ISIS suicide bombers, artillery, and mortars that, in seven months of fighting in 2017, uprooted more than a million people from the still largely un-reconstructed Iraqi city of Mosul (where 10 million tons of rubble are estimated to remain). Or try to bring to mind the rubblized city of Ramadi. Or consider the destruction of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the former “capital” of ISIS’s caliphate, left more than 80% “uninhabitable” after the U.S. (and allied) air forces dropped 20,000 bombs on it. All are versions of the same phenomenon.

And yet when it comes to asteroids and the human future, one thing should be obvious. Such examples still represent relatively small-scale local impacts, given what’s to come.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The end is nigh -- though only for the TomDispatch version of 2018! I’m now going to take my usual brief rest and see if I can shake off one of the lesser periods of American life. The next TomDispatch post will appear on the evening of January 6, 2019, and let’s hope that, with the dawn of a new year, we see a few sparks of light and hope. In the meantime, a last small reminder: if you’re feeling... well, not holiday cheer perhaps, but at least a desire to boost one small outpost of opposition in an increasingly disturbed world, think about visiting our donation page and offering us a final round of support in 2018. As always, for a contribution of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can choose to receive a signed, personalized copy of one of the many splendid books we have on offer. And as a last note: my thanks to all of you who responded to these pleas of mine and gave so generously. Honestly, you give me hope! A happy holiday and a good new year to all TomDispatch readers! Tom]

On December 9th, the Washington Post covered Donald Trump's offhand, if long expected, announcement of the ousting of retired Marine General John Kelly from an embattled White House. Its report focused on the chief of staff’s “rocky tenure” there with a nod to his many merits, among them that he “often talked the president out of his worst impulses.” Buried deep in the piece, though, was a single line that caught my eye (and possibly that of no one else on this planet): “Kelly told others that among his biggest accomplishments was keeping the president from making rash military moves, such as removing troops from sensitive zones.”

It was admittedly neither a direct quote, nor attributed to anyone, nor elaborated on in the rest of the piece. So that’s all we know, not whether Kelly took particular pride in stopping the president from removing American troops from, say, Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or for that matter Niger. But however passing and non-specific that line may have been, it seemed to catch something striking about these last two years, a time when those in the mainstream opposition to the president have come to love so many of the retired generals and former heads of outfits like the National Security Agency and the CIA, and have turned them into the equivalent of security blankets for the rest of us. They were the men (because they were all men) intent on talking Donald Trump out of “his worst impulses” and so, in the phrase of the era, they were the “adults in the room.”

Thanks to the wars and other shenanigans that those “adults” had already been so deeply involved in and the money -- more than $5 trillion of it -- squandered on them, they were also the men who helped generate the dissatisfaction that gave Donald Trump his opening in the first place. And now, having been part of the problem, they are in full chorus condemnation of Donald Trump's most recent solution: to withdraw American troops from Syria (and soon evidently from Afghanistan as well).  We -- that is, the country whose actions were crucial in creating ISIS in the first place -- are now the only "bulwark" against its return.  That goes without saying, of course, among Republicans, Democrats, the national security elite, America's generals, and that last "adult" in the room, Secretary of Defense James Mattis -- or at least it did until, days ago, he resigned in protest.  And as U.S. Army major and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen suggests in his year-ending piece, as that one Washington Post line about Kelly indicates, they worked awfully hard to ensure that President Trump wouldn't withdraw from any part of the mess they made. With that thought in mind and withdrawals about to be under way on an increasingly grim planet, Happy New Year! Tom

The World According to the “Adults in the Room”
A Year of Forever War in Review
By Danny Sjursen

Leave it to liberals to pin their hopes on the oddest things. In particular, they seemed to find post-Trump solace in the strange combination of the two-year-old Mueller investigation and the good judgment of certain Trump appointees, the proverbial “adults in the room.” Remember that crew? It once included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, and a trio of active and retired generals -- so much for civilian control of the military -- including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Until his sudden resignation, Mattis was (just barely) the last man standing. Still, for all these months, many Americans had counted on them to all but save the nation from an unpredictable president. They were the ones supposedly responsible for helming (or perhaps hemming in) the wayward ship of state when it came to foreign and national security policy.

Too bad it was all such a fantasy. As Donald Trump wraps up his second year in the Oval Office, despite sudden moves in Syria and Afghanistan, the United States remains entrenched in a set of military interventions across significant parts of the world. Worse yet, what those adults guided the president toward was yet more bombing, the establishment of yet more bases, and the funding of yet more oversized Pentagon budgets. And here was the truly odd thing: every time The Donald tweeted negatively about any of those wars or uttered an offhand remark in opposition to the warfare state or the Pentagon budget, that triumvirate of generals and good old Rex went to work steering him back onto the well-worn track of Bush-Obama-style forever wars.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Consider this the penultimate 2018 note from me on the subject of donations. Despite an improving end of the year when it comes to contributions, life at a website like TomDispatch means always needing more. In a note above the last piece I posted, I included a set of books that any TD reader could request, signed and personalized, for a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.). Now, let me add two more amid an impressive list of books still available at our donation page: former New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte’s just reissued classic, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, and Rory Fanning’s Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America. Check it all out at the donation page and help this website prepare for a fantastic 2019! Tom]

After six all-American decades in business, Toys "R" Us crashed in 2018, closing its 735 U.S. stores and filing for bankruptcy.  As it happens, however, the Washington-branded outfit, Mistreatment and Misconduct "R" Us (or M&M "R" Us), continues to thrive, as it has this century so far. In case the holiday season has swept your memories away, let me just remind you that, over the last 18 years, it has specialized in torture (with a particular emphasis on waterboarding); the abuse of prisoners in offshore jails and black sites; high-tech global assassinations (oops... sorry, “targeted killings”) across large swaths of the planet (their numbers up again in the Trump years); well-organized kidnappings from the streets of major global cities as well as the backlands of the planet; the deaths of civilians in a striking range of countries; the displacement of startling numbers of people, thanks to its never-ending wars and conflicts (refugees who have, in turn, helped spark right-wing populist movements in Europe and the U.S.); the aiding and abetting of the Saudi war in Yemen and so helping to create what could become the worst famine and starvation crisis in memory; and, most recently, border horrors of all sorts, especially focused on the mistreatment of children.  And all of that is just to start down a list of its twenty-first-century “successes.”

When it comes to M&M "R" Us, bankruptcy is not an option. If anything, the behavior is only spreading as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg has long been documenting. Today, she takes us onto the high seas to show us how that enterprise continues to thrive in the Trump era with -- and you hardly need a New Year’s prediction for this one -- more to come in 2019. Tom

America’s Mixed Messages
This Time at Sea
By Karen J. Greenberg

I grew up in New London, Connecticut, watching many a military ship float by my window. New London was home to the Coast Guard Academy and sat across the river from a U.S. Navy submarine base. Uniformed guardsmen, sailors in training, and sub crews leaving port would regularly wave to my friends and me from the decks of their ships. It never occurred to me that, 50 years later, such ships would come to my attention again, this time because of the confusing messages they’re sending overseas, a reflection of the conflicting images embedded in Washington’s latest version of diplomacy and foreign policy.

We still want populations around the world to admire, appreciate, and respect this country as a democracy and a powerful protector. Some ships are used to make exactly that point. And yet, in the twenty-first-century version of war American-style, other ships have become the very image and essence of hardship and harm in ways that violate the most basic tenets of democracy and justice.

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