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We’re plunged into a world in which yesterday’s strangeness is instantly overwhelmed by today’s, which, in turn, is guaranteed to be overshadowed by tomorrow’s. Our president regularly regales his infamous base while mocking his enemies in ways that, not long ago, would have been presidentially inconceivable. It’s a world in which he recently flew to Japan and presented a sumo wrestling champion with a made-up “President’s cup” trophy the size of Mount Everest, in which he and the North Korean autocrat he’s having a bromance with (“we fell in love”) both mocked a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president (fondly known to you-know-who as “Swampman Joe Bidan” -- yes, extremely stable geniuses aren’t always the world’s best spellers) as a "low IQ individual," aka "a fool of low IQ." It’s the world in which that same president dismissed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for having mentally "lost it" and then retweeted a doctored video of her seeming to slur her words ("Pelosi stammers through news conference") -- all of which barely begins to scratch the surface of this El Niño political moment. No wonder few here even seem to notice a strangeness that preceded The Donald into the world and seems to defy him in a Pelosi-like fashion.

I’m thinking about Washington’s never-ending wars still spreading across the Greater Middle East and Africa all these years after 9/11, the ones that began in Afghanistan and nearly 18 years later are threatening to add Iran to the mix. (Remind me, for instance, how many U.S. troops remain in Syria since the president tweeted last December that he was about to withdraw all 2,000 of them.) The Afghan war alone is already by far the longest in our history. It just got its 17th U.S. commander and yet somehow the situation there only grows worse as the Taliban gains ground, refugees flee the region, terror groups spread, and endless versions of American war-making -- from troop surges to counterinsurgency, blow-'em-away air power to the use of the largest nonnuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal -- are fruitlessly brought to bear on the situation. If all of this isn’t evidence of the brain-dead nature of the U.S. political and military leadership in these years, a crew that has seemed incapable of learning a single lesson from its own acts or of altering its behavior in any significant way, what is? And so many years (and taxpayer dollars) later, except for eternally thanking U.S. soldiers for their service, most Americans hardly seem to notice that those wars are ongoing, which, to my mind, should qualify as another form of brain-deadism.

I can’t help but remember the line from George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan: “How long, O Lord, how long?” Which is why today’s piece by TomDispatch regular Michael Klare should be considered genuine news. It took almost two decades of plodding, destructive, victory-less effort, but parts of the U.S. military (the Navy and Air Force) have evidently finally begun thinking about how to ditch the war on terror -- even if only to focus on the possibility of getting into a potentially more devastating kind of conflict. Tom

The Navy’s War vs. Bolton’s War
The Pentagon’s Spoiling for a Fight -- But With China, Not Iran
By Michael T. Klare

The recent White House decision to speed the deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group and other military assets to the Persian Gulf has led many in Washington and elsewhere to assume that the U.S. is gearing up for war with Iran. As in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials have cited suspect intelligence data to justify elaborate war preparations. On May 13th, acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan even presented top White House officials with plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East for possible future combat with Iran and its proxies. Later reports indicated that the Pentagon might be making plans to send even more soldiers than that.

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Think of U.S. policy in the Middle East as the proverbial broken record. Explain it as you will, Washington’s focus always comes back to Iran. Seldom has a country that remains anything but a superpower (even a regional one) loomed larger. It all started in 1953 when the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of a democratically elected Iranian government, and left power in the hands of the autocratic young shah (and his brutal secret police). In other words, Washington’s modern history in the region began with a devastating blow against a democracy (and against democracy itself). In a sense, neither country has ever recovered. Of course, blowback for that act finally arrived in 1979, when the Shah was ousted, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile, American diplomats were taken hostage, and the clerics ascended to power.

The enmity between the two countries would only grow in the years that followed. Though it’s long been forgotten here, in the mid-1980s, the U.S. secretly backed Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. (Yes, the same Saddam who, within years, would become the “Adolf Hitler” of the Middle East in Washington’s eyes.) The U.S. military even helped his forces target Iranian troop concentrations at a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons on them. It was another bitter blow to the Iranians (though President Ronald Reagan's administration also secretly sold that country arms in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal). And then, of course, George W. Bush’s administration turned on Saddam, declared him part of an “axis of evil” (including, of course, Iran), attempted to “decapitate” his government, invaded his country, and left its ruler to be hung. But even when destroying its former ally and disastrously occupying Iraq, Bush's top officials, including John Bolton, never took their eyes off Iran. As the saying reportedly went at the time, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”

The real men, of course, didn’t make it there in 2003 or thereafter, but it seems that they’re once again angling to take a shot at it, as the Trump administration further beefs up U.S. forces in the region. Almost 70 years after Mossadegh and Iranian democracy went down for the count, the blowback only continues. (Even Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, might have been amazed.) And so many years later, what could possibly go wrong with such a policy approach to the Middle East? As retired Army major and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen suggests today, when it comes to both this country’s eternal fixation on Iran and its eternal devotion to “democracy,” Washington is playing that same broken record again. Hey, remind me, isn’t it time to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran? Tom

Troika Fever
Key American Allies in the Middle East Are the Real Tyrants
By Danny Sjursen

American foreign policy can be so retro, not to mention absurd. Despite being bogged down in more military interventions than it can reasonably handle, the Trump team recently picked a new fight -- in Latin America. That’s right! Uncle Sam kicked off a sequel to the Cold War with some of our southern neighbors, while resuscitating the boogeyman of socialism. In the process, National Security Advisor John Bolton treated us all to a new phrase, no less laughable than Bush the younger’s 2002 "axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). He labeled Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua a "troika of tyranny."

Alliteration no less! The only problem is that the phrase ridiculously overestimates both the degree of collaboration among those three states and the dangers they pose to their hegemonic neighbor to the north. Bottom line: in no imaginable fashion do those little tin-pot tyrannies offer either an existential or even a serious threat to the United States. Evidently, however, the phrase was meant to conjure up enough ill will and fear to justify the Trump team’s desire for sweeping regime change in Latin America. Think of it as a micro-version of Cold War 2.0.

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Call it strange, but call it something. After all, never in history had there been such active opposition to a war before it began. I’m thinking, of course, about the antiwar surge that, in the winter and early spring of 2003, preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Starting in the autumn of 2002, in fact, the top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration couldn’t have signaled more clearly that such an attack was coming. They had been ready to do so even earlier but, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card so classically put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.”

In the months that followed, one of those “new products” would turn out to be an antiwar movement. Outraged citizens took to the streets globally by the millions and, in this country, in small towns and large cities in staggering numbers carrying handmade signs saying things like “Contain Saddam -- and Bush,” “Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?," and "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?"  It was an unprecedented planetary movement of protest. More than a decade after the Soviet Union imploded, Patrick Tyler of the New York Times even suggested that those demonstrators might represent a second superpower. (“There may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”) And then, despite such opposition, the Bush administration launched its mission-accomplished invasion and, though in the years that followed disaster ensued, the marches died away and that antiwar movement seemed to evaporate. Ever since, as the U.S. military intervened again and again -- from Iraq to Yemen, Libya to Syria -- throwing away literally trillions of dollars in the process, bombing, killing, uprooting, destroying, but never actually winning, next to no one would take to the streets in protest, no handmade signs would be made, no attention would seemingly be paid. Washington would continue to fight its endless sinkhole wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, unsettling whole swathes of the planet, with nary a peep at home.

Consider it one of the mysteries of our moment. Congress (until recently) remained supine when it came to those conflicts, while Americans basically looked the other way and went about their business as their tax dollars were squandered on a set of wars from hell. It’s in this context -- and that of a president who claimed he would get us out of our forever wars but only seems to keep getting us in further -- that TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, an antiwar activist (as I was) in the Vietnam era, looks back on that distant moment with a strange sense of regret (one that I deeply understand). Tom

My Pentagon Regret
As the U.S. Rattles Its Sabers at Tehran, Echoes of Sabers Past
By James Carroll

Earlier this month, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group -- the massive aircraft carrier itself with its dozens of warplanes and thousands of sailors and marines, a guided missile cruiser, and four destroyers -- suddenly began to make its way from the Mediterranean Sea into the Persian Gulf, heading for the waters off Iran. Pentagon sources spoke of ominous but unspecified threats. The U.S. military moved into a showy state of readiness, with reports that a force of up to 120,000 troops might be mobilized and sent to the Middle East for a possible future war with Iran.

In the Trump era, such American saber rattling, especially by hyper-hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton, feels so unnervingly routine that it might not have even made me sit up. Then I read that the latest Middle East deployment included a task force of -- god save us from memory! -- B-52s, the massive strategic bombers dating from the 1950s that wreaked such havoc in the first great war of my adulthood: Vietnam.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next post will be on Tuesday, May 28th. Tom]

Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, focuses on the sole memorial in this country to those who have fought in our now almost 18-year-old war on terror -- never actually a coherent “war” but a spreading set of conflicts, upheavals, and chaos of every sort. As Bacevich points out, the memorial to American soldiers who were sent into that chaos and died is essentially hidden away in a small Midwestern town, which tells you what you need to know about the value Americans actually place on those wars.

Of course, there is one other shrine in this country, New York City's 9/11 Memorial and Museum, dedicated to the nearly 3,000 civilians who died in al-Qaeda’s initial attacks. Ever since, civilians have suffered massively without any kind of commemoration whatsoever -- and yet, in a sense, you might say that there are indeed another set of “memorials” to the dead of the post-9/11 war on terror. You just have to put that word in quotation marks. I’m thinking about the rubblized cities of the Middle East. Of, for instance, Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, significant parts of which were, in 2017, reduced to ruins by American air power and artillery (which delivered an estimated 29,000 munitions) and ISIS suicide bombs and other explosives.  It still largely remains so. I’m thinking of the Syrian provincial city of Raqqa, on which the U.S. and allied air forces reportedly rained more than 20,000 bombs and which also remains in rubble. Other Iraqi cities like Ramadi and Fallujah had similar experiences.

Think of those cities (or former cities) as the very opposite of America’s memorial walls to the dead. Think of them as the wall-less cities of the dead (and the desperately living) in a region that, in response to the brutal killings of those victims in the towers in New York, continues to be rubblized with another war now possibly in sight. Tom

The “Forever Wars” Enshrined
Visiting mar-SAYLZ
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Earlier this month, I spent a day visiting Marseilles to videotape a documentary about recent American military history, specifically the ongoing wars that most of us prefer not to think about.

Lest there be any confusion, let me be more specific. I am not referring to Marseilles (mar-SAY), France, that nation’s largest port and second largest city with a population approaching 900,000. No, my destination was Marseilles (mar-SAYLZ), Illinois, a small prairie town with a population hovering around 5,000.

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Election-Meddling Follies, 1945-2019
Living in a Nation of Political Narcissists
By Tom Engelhardt

In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let's face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as Jared Kushner improbably claimed, “a couple of Facebook ads” or, as the Mueller report described it, “the Russian government interfer[ing]... in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

But let me mention just a few of the things that we didn’t learn from the Mueller report. We didn’t learn that Russian agents appeared at Republican Party headquarters in 2016 with millions of dollars in donations to influence the coming election. (Oops, my mistake!  That was CIA agents in the Italian election of 1948!) We didn’t learn that a Russian intelligence agency in combination with Chinese intelligence, aided by a major Chinese oil company, overthrew an elected U.S. president and installed Donald Trump in the White House as their autocrat of choice. (Oops, my mistake again! That was the CIA, dispatched by an American president, and British intelligence, with the help of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. In 1953, they overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, and installed the young Shah as an autocratic ruler, the very first -- but hardly the last -- time the CIA successfully ousted a foreign government.) We didn’t learn that key advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin were in close touch with rogue elements of the U.S. military preparing to stage a coup d'état in Washington, kill President Barack Obama in a direct assault on the White House, and put the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in office. (Sorry, again my slip-up and full apologies! That was President Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger in contact with Chilean military officers who, on September 11, 1973 -- the first 9/11 -- staged an armed uprising during which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of that country, died and army commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet took power.) We didn’t learn that, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, Russian secret service agents engaged in a series of plots to poison or in some other fashion assassinate Barack Obama during his presidency and, in the end, had at least a modest hand in encouraging those who did kill him after he left office. (Oh, wait, I was confused on that one, too. I was actually thinking about the plots, as the 1960s began, to do in Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.) Nor, for that matter, did we learn that the Russian military launched a regime-change-style invasion of this country to unseat an American president and get rid of our weapons of mass destruction and then occupied the country for years after installing Donald Trump in power. (Sorry one more time! What I actually had in mind before I got so muddled up was the decision of the top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to launch a “regime-change” invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fraudulent claims that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and install a government of their choice in Baghdad.)

No, none of that happened here. Still, even though most Americans might find it hard to believe, we weren’t exactly the first country to have an election meddled with by an intrusive foreign power with an agenda all its own! And really, my examples above just begin an endless list of events the Mueller report didn’t mention, ones that most Americans no longer know anything about or we wouldn’t have acted as if the Russian election intervention of 2016 stood essentially alone in history.

I don’t, however, want that to sound like blame. After all, if you lived in the United States in these years and didn’t already know the secret history of American intervention and regime change across the globe from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could be forgiven for thinking that never had anyone done anything quite so dastardly as did the Putin regime in attempting to hack and alter the results of an American election. In the media, that Russian intervention has (with the rarest of exceptions) been covered as if it were an event unique in history. Admittedly, whatever the Russians did do in 2016 to lend a hand to Donald Trump, they didn’t plan a coup d’état; it wasn’t an assassination attempt; and it wasn’t, in the normal sense, what has come to be known as “regime change.”

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