Antiwar.com Blog

When you imagine ending a war, do you imagine the U.S. President lamenting the human cost of the war’s financial expense while simultaneously demanding that Congress increase military spending – and while mentioning new wars that could potentially be launched?

Do you picture him blowing up families with missiles from robot airplanes, and committing to continuing those “strikes” while maintaining that such things don’t constitute continuing the war?

Did you hope that if the wars for freedom ever ended we might get our freedoms back, our rights to demonstrate restored, the Patriot Act repealed, the local police rid of their tanks and war weapons, the landscape stripped of all the cameras and metal detectors and bulletproof glass that have grown up for two decades?

Did you imagine the people in Guantanamo cages who were never on a “battlefield” would no longer be viewed as threats to “return” there once the war was “ended”?

Continue reading “What Ending a War Could Look Like”

Ross Douthat suggests that defeat in Afghanistan will have adverse consequences for the U.S. elsewhere in the world:

That said, defeats on distant frontiers can also have consequences closer to the imperial core. The American imperium can’t be toppled by the Taliban. But in our outer empire, in Western Europe and East Asia, perceived US weakness could accelerate developments that genuinely do threaten the American system as it has existed since 1945 – from German-Russian entente to Japanese rearmament to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Douthat is making a slightly more subdued version of the bogus credibility argument, but it is still wrong. It doesn’t make sense that a defeat in Afghanistan would threaten the US position in Europe or East Asia. The nature of a peripheral war where the US has no vital interests is that it is peripheral, and therefore its effects for good or ill are bound to be limited. US defeat should be a cause for humility, reflection, and learning, but if anything it should focus Washington’s attention on those interests that are truly important. To borrow from Douthat’s Roman comparisons, defeat in the Teutoburg Forest or during Julian’s disastrous Mesopotamian campaign had little or no effect on the wider empire. If there is a lesson to draw from them, it is that it is unwise to take big risks with unnecessary military campaigns.

One reason why the US embarks on these unnecessary military campaigns is the conceit that it is an empire that must police the “frontiers.” A normal country with a normal foreign policy would not delude itself into believing that it has the right or responsibility to try to pacify “distant frontiers.” Its leaders would not try to con the public into continuing unnecessary wars for the sake of “credibility” and prestige. If we would free ourselves of these pointless wars, we ought to give up on the imperial pretensions that keep them going for decades. That means that Americans need to stop thinking like imperialists and we need to stop buying into the myths of empire, including the myth that defeat in some peripheral theater is a world-historical disaster. Jack Snyder identified this as the first myth of empire in Myths of Empire:

Just as proponents of expansion have promised that cumulative gains will lead to imperial security, so too they have warned that losses in the empire’s periphery can easily bring a collapse of power at the imperial core, through any of several mechanisms: a cumulative erosion of economic and military resources; the increasing difficulty of imperial defense owing to the loss of strategic forward positions; or the progressive abandonment of the state by its allies, who might infer that it would not live up to its commitments.

As Snyder notes, it is “[r]elatively satisfied powers like Britain and the United States [that] have been especially prone to this domino theory.” This is a myth used to justify continued intervention in peripheral conflicts by trying to tie something that doesn’t matter to a state’s security to its core interests. If you “fear some of the possible consequences of the weakness and incompetence exposed in that retreat,” as Douthat says he does, you are buying into this myth.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Former President Obama famously expressed his belief about the "war on terror" that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward."

Will we learn from the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan? Only by looking backward.

An honest assessment would show:

1: The US occupation of Afghanistan was avoidable. In late 2001, Taliban leaders were reeling from our invasion, and sought a deal that could have led to peace and a pluralistic government. But the Bush Administration rebuffed them, with Donald Rumsfeld saying, "The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders." It is appalling and tragic that so many Americans and Afghans have since lost their lives in a conflict that did not have to be.

2: U.S. security operations alienated the Afghan people. US drones have killed many innocent civilians in Afghanistan and the adjacent Pakistani war zone, as depicted in the documentary Wounds of Waziristan and accounts of drone operators. CIA-led night raids on civilian homes caused widespread outrage and boosted support for the Taliban. The Afghan war was used to justify opening the offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay, where more than 220 Afghans experienced indefinite detention without charges.

Continue reading “The Value of Looking Backward “

On COI #159, Kevin Gosztola joins Kyle Anzalone to discuss the people who were right about the Afghan War all along, among them Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who cast the sole ‘no’ vote against the 2001 authorization to attack Afghanistan. Lee correctly predicted that the bill would be exploited to justify an endless war, and has continued to fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF. 

Kevin recounts the story of Matthew Hoh. Working as a State Department official, Hoh realized Obama’s Afghan surge would be a deadly failure. He, therefore, blew the whistle on the administration’s propaganda campaign, which insisted the ‘surge’ approach employed in Iraq could be exported to Afghanistan. While Hoh was largely ignored, he gained key backing for his claims, which have since been proven correct. 

Like Hoh, Daniel L. Davis also blew the whistle over the disastrous Afghan surge. Years after Hoh, Davis reported to Congress – and the American people – that the country’s leaders were lying about their non-existent successes in Afghanistan. 

Kevin talks about the importance of journalist Micheal Hastings, who penned an explosive 2010 Rolling Stone profile that resulted in the firing of Stanley McChrystal, the “Runaway General.” Hastings also exposed the absurdity of the US counter-insurgency campaign pushed by the disgraced General David Petraeus. 

The horrors and failures of the Afghan War were also published by Wikileaks, thanks to leaker Chelsea Manning and journalist Julian Assange. Kevin explains why Manning passed the Afghan War Logs to Wikileaks and updates Julians Assange’s extradition appeal. 

Daniel Hale is another persecuted whistleblower, who released important information showing the massive number of civilians murdered by the US drone program. Hale appeared in the documentary ‘National Bird,’ but was not prosecuted for leaking the information until years later. 

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Kevin Gosztola is managing editor at Shadowproof, host of the “Dissenter Weekly,” and co-host of the podcast “Unauthorized Disclosure.”

The growing campaign to oppose Canada spending tens of billions of dollars on 88 new fighter jets faces an important, if unconventional, obstacle: the warplanes themselves. Fighter jets are an important tool of militarist propaganda.

In recent weeks Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) planes have done numerous flyovers and participated in airshows across the country. As part of "Operation Inspiration" CF-18s flew over the Prince George Exhibition and lower Vancouver Island. The RCAF does flyovers at dozens of special events every year. In 2019 they flew by the opening game of the NBA finals and the Toronto Raptors’ massive victory celebration.

Fighter jets also participate in numerous airshows every year. In recent weeks CF-18s were part of the Camrose Drive-In Airshow, Cold Lake Aqua Days and Abbotsford International Airshow. To create popular support for the Air Force the RCAF has promoted airshows and flying for a century. In "The Public Face of the Royal Canadian Air Force: The Importance of Air Shows and Demonstration Teams to the R.C.A.F" Timothy Balzer writes: "For almost as long as Canada has had an air force, it has had demonstration flyers displaying the skill and daring required to be a pilot. From the first formation flight in 1919 on, demonstration teams have played an important role in keeping the Royal Canadian Air Force engaged and interacting with the Canadian public."

Continue reading “‘Sexy’ Jets, Airshows Sell War and Militarism”

Max Boot joins Richard Haass in touting the great success of the U.S. foreign policy establishment:

Yes, post-1945 policymakers got it catastrophically wrong in Vietnam. But they got it right by containing the Soviet Union while building security alliances and promoting free trade. Those policies set the stage for the greatest expansion of freedom and prosperity in history, made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, and eventually led to the peaceful end of the Cold War.

It is common for defenders of the foreign policy establishment to invoke the policies adopted at the creation of the modern national security state as proof that the establishment can get things right, but this is a selective and sanitized history that requires us to forget a lot of what the U.S. did in the name of containment. It requires a great deal of whitewashing of the U.S. record during the Cold War to conclude simply that American policymakers “got it right.” It also tries to give the U.S. credit for developments that its policies did not cause, since the peaceful end of the Cold War was almost entirely the result of internal changes in the USSR and eastern Europe driven by the peoples of these countries. What a lot of all these defenses have in common is that they can’t identify any great successes of U.S. foreign policy in the last 20 or 25 years. In order to defend foreign policy elites today, they usually have to go back to the 1950s or earlier.

Defenders of the foreign policy establishment’s record are now usually willing to acknowledge that the Vietnam War was wrong, but they don’t have much to say about a lot of other similarly horrible policies. Did policymakers get things right when the U.S. cooperated in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in the name of anticommunism? Did they get things right when the U.S. sided with a Pakistani government committing genocide in Bangladesh? Did they get it right when they were cozying up to the Khmer Rouge in an effort to oppose Vietnamese influence?

Paul Thomas Chamberlin recounts this last episode in The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace:

However, none of this precluded a rapprochement between the Khmer Rouge and Washington – at least as far as U.S. policymakers were concerned. Officials in the Ford administration worried about the potential for Hanoi to expand Vietnam’s influence. To block Hanoi’s bid for regional power, the Ford administration hoped to reconcile with the Khmer Rouge and support a greater Chinese presence in Southeast Asia.

Chamberlin then quotes Kissinger: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”1

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.