Urban Shield: Doing Unto Us What We Did To Iraq, Syria, Etc.
By Jane Stillwater
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2017/06/urban-shield-doing-unto-us-what-we-did.html
How many Americans even remember America’s brutal and unnecessary “war” on Vietnam? Even though 50,000 (fifty thousand) of our sons and daughters died in that conflict? And that said “war” went very badly for us when a bunch of determined farmers in black pajamas kicked our butts?
How many Americans even know that our military-industrial complex financed, encouraged and promoted Saddam Hussein’s “war” on Iran in the 1980s — even though that brutal and uncalled-for attack lasted ten long bloody years? And that Iraq, even though it was working hand in hand with both America and Israel and probably most of Europe too, couldn’t even manage to defeat puny Iran?
And journalist Steve Fournier also asks the same question about Russia. “Would you entrust a war to an army that couldn’t defeat some of the weakest nations on earth? The armed forces of the United States have been engaged for over a generation in warfare against governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Syria. They have managed to destroy lives and property in abundance and have extinguished entire ancient cultures, but they have accomplished no discernible mission. Typically facing poorly-armed and undernourished enemies, they have been unable to record a victory since 1945. Should we trust them to take on Russia?” http://www.currentinvective.com/wp/?p=223
And then there were all those bloody and unnecessary “wars” on Nicaragua, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Palestine (by proxy), Syria, Yemen, Chile, Korea (twice so far) and so on — all of them now conveniently forgotten. http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/06/white-house-says-it-will-fake-chemical-weapon-attacks-in-syria.html#more
Hell, Americans can’t even remember any of the centuries of “wars” on poorly-armed American Indians or even the three or four centuries of brutal and cowardly attacks on defenseless Black people, conveniently referred to as either “slavery” or “Jim Crow”.
And now the same type of folks who brought us all those stupid and shameful “wars” abroad are now trying to bring these same stupid and shameful “wars” home here too. Does your local police department really need a tank? Seriously? Urban Shield sounds pretty much like Iraqi Shield or Afghan Shield or Syrian Shield, all of which ended badly for the civilians of those countries. Bad news for them — and now almost certainly bad news for us too. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-america-armed-terrorists-in-syria/
But great news for the military-industrial complex!
And speaking of urban stuff, here’s the next chapter of my recent adventures in New York City:
Day Three, Part 1: One would think that I would have fallen asleep easily last night after taking the red-eye from SFO — but no. Maybe I got a few hours of primo sleep. But whether or not sleep was involved, my wake-up call still came at 6:15 am. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2017/06/are-americans-even-good-people-any-more.html
And then I discovered Hudson Street Park. 20 blocks of lovely waterfront walkways going directly from The Jane hotel to the Javits Center. Birds actually sang!
Then I got in free to the Book Expo’s authors’ breakfast on my press pass. Karmic reward! Sweet. But shoulda known that the breakfast was not going to be gluten-free. Not even oatmeal or fruit cups were involved. Just orange juice and cream cheese for me.
Damn, there’s a lot of people here — and at $70 a pop. Who’s going to speak? Stephen King. Anyway, here I am, sitting right next to the Random House/Penguin VIP table. There must be at least a thousand people here. 150 tables of ten, plus a bunch of seating for groundlings in the back.
Oliver King, Stephen’s son, spoke first. “Our family sat around and pitched one-line story lines to each other at the dinner table. One of those story lines was about a world without women. Our new book ‘Sleeping Beauty’ resulted.”
Stephen King said, “I used to be a latchkey kid back before there were even latchkey kids — back in the 1950s. And my mom used to say, ‘If there’s no ring around the toilet bowl, you know that a woman is around’. Men just don’t do things like that. Women are the cooling factor in society when men run too hot.” Surely Stephen King didn’t just say that, that all women are good for is cleaning the toilet. I’m sure he meant something else. Will have to read the book to find out.
Whitney Cummings spoke next. “I wanted to write something that will last forever. Books are permanent. I’m an unapologetic book nerd. They don’t bombard you with visual chaos like social media does.” She’s funny as hell, is a screenwriter for “Two Broke Girls”.
“It’s totally hard to write a book. I thought it would be fun and sexy like when Cary Bradshaw did it on TV. But it was actually pretty frustrating. And then there’s fact-checkers. They should go over to Fox News. Fox News needs fact-checkers. Leave me alone!”
She used to be crazy. “You can’t just magically stop being crazy. I went into therapy. I was co-dependent, couldn’t say no. Busy but unfulfilled. Needing the approval of others.” She gave a really humorous presentation. Made all this terrible stuff sound laugh-out-loud funny. “Ambian and wine is not a sustainable combination.”
Her book is a manual about how to change your brain. “People only show their good sides on social media but a lot of people really are in pain. But people do want to change and grow. This book will hopefully provide healing laughs.”
Claire Messud spoke next. “My novel, The Burning Girl, is about two young girls and their close friendship as they pass through the storm of adolescence. We all remember middle school. When something doesn’t make sense just think, ‘Picture this as happening in middle school,’ and then it will make perfect sense. A week can contain a year’s worth of emotions.”
We all put together stories to make sense of our lives, Messud told us. “We fill in the blanks. Many elements are familiar, universal — what we give up to become adults, from only pieces of what actually goes on. But a state of uncertainty between knowing and unknowing is what makes us human.”
Scott Kelly spoke next. 520 days in space, 340 of them consecutively. He wrote a book called “Endurance”. When he was a kid, he read a book called “The Right Stuff” and immediately decided to become an astronaut. “It surprised even me that I did this, and my book is the story of how I got there. Today is a critical day in our nation’s future. I have looked at the earth from space. You don’t see a lot of rain forests down there anymore. You can actually see the pollution. Plus all the cooperation between people and countries regarding space programs shows that we can do anything if we have dreams.”
Then Jessmyn Ward spoke about her new book, “Sing, Unburied, Sing”. “Faulkner once said, ‘To understand the world you must first understand Mississippi’. My mother was a domestic and my father was a factory worker. I never thought I would become a writer. Mississippi will hug you before it smothers you.” Mississippi also has some of the best bookstores there is. Jackson, Tupelo, Oxford. “The past bears down especially hard on the present in Mississippi. Why? It was heavily invested in slavery and then later in Jim Crow and Parchman Farm. How does the past live in the present? That’s the question I constantly ask myself. Writing is my attempt to answer this question.”
She tells us that, “Mississippi is the foundation and walls. America is the roof. Your home fails you, murders you. There is terror — and there is hope.”
Pete Souza then spoke about his new book, “Obama”. He was the White House photographer during Obama’s presidency. “So. I miss this guy. I took two million photos in eight years.” A nice selection of his photos were projected onto a big screen, and that was the end of the authors’ breakfast.
Then it was off to the main exhibit hall to see who was giving away free pens. Nobody was! I only scored three or four pens. Bummer.
But at the Soho Press booth I scored the new Colin Cotterill book! And a pre-publication copy at that! Not to mention a new Timothy Hallinan book, “The Widows of Malabar Hill” and a few others as well.
I also got a copy of the new Joe Ide book, “Righteous,” and some free macadamia nuts — but paid three whole dollars for a tiny bag of potato chips. Had to. By that time I was starving.
Bought a deli salad after leaving Javits Center and then took the 9th Avenue bus back home to The Jane. Am going back tonight to attend the Hillary Clinton School of Lies but that will be about it for the BEA for today. I think.
To be continued…
Neutralize North Korean Threat
North Korea continues to expand its nuclear weapons program and is making progress in developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the Western U.S. It is working on miniaturizing nuclear weapons to fit on ICBMs by early 2018, and it threatens to attack the U.S. with nuclear warheads.
North Korea is a virulent Communist country with a closed militaristic society governed by Kim Jong-un, who appears to be unstable and ready to aggressively use his military forces.
If North Korea reaches the point of being able to launch ICBMs against us, we might have to launch a pre-emptive conventional strike against their missile sites after beefing up the ground forces in South Korea and putting them on full alert. Hopefully, the Terminal High Altitude Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system in South Korea will intercept any missile attacks by North Korea.
We will probably have to deploy additional U.S. army, marines and air force units to Japan and possibly Korea and position a number of carrier battle groups off of North Korea prior to the pre-emptive strike.
Donald Moskowitz, Londonderry, N.H.
Rockets’ Red Glare And Bombs Bursting In Air
By John LaForge
A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.
With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. U.S. drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from supercarriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Saturday, June 24, when US bombs destroyed four houses.
Every child killed or maimed by U.S.-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013, in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”
Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass U.S. military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.
If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by U.S. drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017, directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.
U.S. offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]
In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a U.S. gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.
The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.
Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.
This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as U.S. drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.