Peace & Nonviolence

 
A U.S. Army Special Forces weapons sergeant addresses a group of Nigerien soldiers before a team exercise in Diffa, Niger, in March. (Spc. Zayid Ballesteros / U.S. Army)

• Consider economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter’s description: the nation “pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war … there was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger … the whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies.” Sound familiar? He was talking about Ancient Rome. We all know how that turned out.
• Related: How America Spreads Global Chaos
• Related: 'Stop US Aggression': Venezuela and the World  Reacts to 'Imperialist' Trump’s Military Threat Against Venezuela

Danny Sjursen, TruthDig

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Nov 10, 2017 | Investigating yourself: a surefire way to never get to the bottom of anything. Of course, in some cases that is exactly the point.

Take the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), the headquarters responsible for U.S. military forces deployed on the vast African continent. Last month, Africa—specifically remote Niger—catapulted (however briefly) to the top of American newscasts when four U.S. Army special operations troops were killed in a ferocious ambush. The details remain sketchy but officials quickly blamed the Islamic State of Greater Sahara (ISGS), a loose affiliate of ISIS, though curiously neither al-Qaida nor Islamic State claimed responsibility. Many tactical questions lingered: Did the troops receive a change of mission, were they set up by local village elders, did they have enough air support? Well, this week AFRICOM’s own, two-star chief of staff was appointed to investigate the “incident” in Niger. Certainly, the general will ask and—hopefully—answer those basic tactical questions.

Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, "Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge."

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Related:

How America Spreads Global Chaos, Nicolas J. S. Davies, Antiwar.com

Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic rather than a military “solution” to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other than putty in the hands of the CIA.

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'Stop US Aggression': Venezuela and the World  Reacts to 'Imperialist' Trump’s Military Threat Against Venezuela, Compiled by David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest 

• Part 1: 'Stop US Aggression': Venezuela Responds to 'Imperialist' Trump
  • U.S. President Donald Trump claims he is exploring "a possible military option" against Venezuela.
• Part 2: The World Reacts to Trump’s Military Threat Against Venezuela
  • Politicians, social movements and governments have been issuing their responses.
• Related: Nygaard Notes | Venezuala

No Peace! No Justice!  Please share this post.

• The Scandal of Pentagon Spending 
• Your Tax Dollars Support Troops of Defense Contractor CEOs 

William Hartung, Tom Dispatch

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October 10, 2017 | I’m sure you’ve heard about the $65 million.  Or was it $86 million?  Or was it even more?  You know, the funds the Pentagon sunk into that hotshot plane it was preparing for its Afghan drug interdiction program. You haven’t?

Well, as Megan Rose reported at ProPublica, with its “electro-optical infra-red video capacity,” that counternarcotics plane was supposed to lend a significant hand in surveilling and disrupting the Afghan heroin trade. Only one small problem. That single plane never made it out of a warehouse in Delaware or flew a mission in Afghanistan, whatever its cost (which the Pentagon was typically incapable of tracking), and when it was recently offered for sale at auction, no one wanted to put down a red cent for it.  And lest you think of that as a bizarre anomaly, consider, as Rose points out, the $3 million patrol boats for Afghanistan the Navy purchased that never made it out of Virginia or the 20 planes for the Afghan air force that the Pentagon spent a mere $486 million on, even though they never flew and finally brought in just $32,000 as scrap metal.  Or think for a moment about the more than $65 billion (yep, billion!) that went into the woefulAfghan military, an inept force long mentored by the U.S. military that remains filled with “ghost soldiers” and plagued by soaring casualties and staggering desertion rates.  Or since America’s war zones have, in these years, been sinkholes of corruption, just recall the $43 million gas station built by the Pentagon in the middle of an Afghan nowhere, or the similarly infamous “highway to nowhere,” or the state-of-the-art U.S. military headquarters in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost to $25 million while under construction and was never used, or the $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion in cash that was somehow stolen from the U.S. in Iraq, which itself was just a drop in the bucket, given the $60 billion lost to waste and fraud in that particular morass of a war zone.  And mind you, that’s just to start down a list of catastrophic “investments” in this country's wars.

William Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.  His most recent book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

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