Rich and Strange Aeons

Who will the US bomb after 2016?

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:30:54 GMT

I forget where I read it, maybe in History Lessons, but someone made the point that from a foreign perspective, the US almost always bombs or invades someone, no matter who the President it. Democratic or Republican, bombs will fall, missiles will fly, boots may go on the ground. The smart money is not "will the US attack" but "when and who?" Sure, from the American POV we've got reasons or excuses for each one, or at least the ones we agree with, but from outside? Dogs have to bark, cows have to moo, and the USA has to attack someone. I think peace activists challenged the world to imagine a world without war; a simpler challenge might be to imagine that the USA could go 8 years without attacking anyone.

What if we'd gone back to isolationism after WWII? No wait, that's a false premise, the US was never isolationist. The public might have been isolationist relative to Europe, but we were occupying the Philippines and still bullying Latin America. But what if we had been fairly isolationist? Say, not moving troops outside our own borders or those of genuinely democratic allies?

No Korean War, which would suck for South Korea. No Vietnam War, which would be a pure win for the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia -- possibly no Khmer Rouge, as US bombing destabilized Cambodia in the first place. No Marines to get killed in Beirut. No invasion of Grenada. No Gulf War, which would suck for Kuwait. No NATO intervention in Bosnia/Kosovo. No long slog in Afghanistan, no attack on Iraq and Libya. If we extend this to not meddling, possibly no overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran (and support for the Shah, and Iran hating us now), no overthrow of Allende in Chile, no support for the Contra terrorists against the Sandanistas. Also no spanking of the UK-France-Israel alliance over the Suez Canal. No Cuban Missile Crisis. No Bay of Pigs. No invasion of Panama to 'arrest' their head of state. No ongoing drone strikes in Yemen. No destruction of a pharmaceutical factory in Somalia.

If we allow for UN Security Council-approved actions, that ushers in the Korean War, Gulf War, and Bosnian War (but not the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia), arguably the best of the set... also those Marines in Beirut, and the Libya strikes, though it's said we went beyond the UN mandate (from protecting the rebels to acting as their air force.) List of UNSC actions.

List of post-1945 actions.

1947 - Greece. U.S. Marines land in Athens and assist in the re-establishment of monarchy and the arrest of Greek Communists.
1965 – Invasion of Dominican Republic. Operation Power Pack. The United States intervened to protect lives and property during a Dominican revolt and sent 20,000 U.S. troops as fears grew that the revolutionary forces were coming increasingly under Communist control.[RL30172] A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country's elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes.
1983 – Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury. Citing the increased threat of Soviet and Cuban influence and noting the development of an international airport following a coup d'état and alignment with the Soviets and Cuba, the U.S. invades the island nation of Grenada.[RL30172]

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Syria links

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 21:12:05 GMT

Senate voting to hand Obama and other presidents a military blank check
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-senates-syria-resolution-has-a-huge-secret-giveaway-to-the-president/279421/

Airfare from NYC to Tel Aviv or Istanbul is $600 at the low end. So something like $1.2 billion to fly 2 million refugees to the US on commercial air. Half that to Paris. Taking proper care of them costs more but I could see choosing to be homeless in the US rather than homeless in a war zone. And the UN is already asking for over $3 billion in refugee aid.

Not saying that's what we should do, but it puts relative "humanitarian" interventions into scale. Spend a billion on missile strikes, or spend a billion on admitting refugees.

(repost) Yglesias argument against Syria bombing, which I found somewhat convincing.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/08/barack_obama_shouldn_t_bomb_syria_the_good_option_is_to_do_nothing.html

speculation on why a chemical attack: rage over Damascus, perhaps accidental use of undiluated gas
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/04/201193/intercepted-call-bolsters-syrian.html#.Uiklaz8kzyC

neo-cons enraged by President consulting with Congress about killing foreigners, as opposed to any other reason where they say he doesn't listen enough
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/09/02/neocons-outraged-that-obama-wants-democratic-approval-for-war/
Not that he's, like, actually committed to being bound by the vote.

context of US bombings: soaring cancers and birth defects in Fallujah
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html

Is the Syrian conflict sparked by water shortages? And Egypt's militarization toward Sudan? Only Turkey and Israel have secure supplies. (Turkey has the sources, Israel makes its own, though I think it also taps the Jordan heavily.)
http://www.timesofisrael.com/lack-of-water-sparked-syrias-conflict-and-it-will-make-egypt-more-militant-too/

Long backgrounder:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/your-labor-day-syria-reader-part-2-william-polk/279255/

Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/target-of-future-drone-attack-urges-american-inter,33749/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/poll-majority-of-americans-approve-of-sending-cong,33752/

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US delcarations of war -- all 5 of them

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 19:39:44 GMT

The US has declared war a whopping 5 times: 1812, Mexico, Spain, WWI, WWII, though some of the latter contain multiple declarations against various countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States

"Authorized by Congress" include the Barbary Wars, invading Russia, Vietnam, Gulf War, younger Bush's wars. UNSC wars start with Korea and include Bosnia and Libya.

And then "On at least 125 occasions, the President has acted without prior express military authorization from Congress." including Apache wars and the Philippine-American war.

I can see abstractly wanting to enforce "Congress has the power to declare war". OTOH, you're fighting pretty much all of US history, going back to 1798. Plus a lot of people will be fairly suspected of politically opportunistic constitutionalism, or double standards.

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Book: Outside the Wire

Wed, 08 May 2013 04:05:56 GMT

Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan, edited by Christine Dumaine Leche.

Ever wonder what it's like to be a soldier in war? My father was a Korean vet, and never talked about it, which seems to be a common thing. As is drinking a lot at times. There are, of course, books out there, like Catch-22 (Heller was a vet.) This book, which I checked out on impulse from a front desk at the Cambridge library, is a collection of short essays and stories by US soldiers in Afghanistan, which they wrote in a creative writing class, itself in Afghanistan, specifically Bagram Air Force Base and Forward Operating Base Salerno, well within the hot zone (e.g. with occasional mortar attacks after class.)

The essays or stories cover combat scenes, the shock of a broken marriage, childhood memories (some as bad as wartime combat), the hurry up and wait excitement-boredom of deployment, incidents on patrols, a raid for a satellite phone to call home with, and more. Perhaps most amusing to me was the final essay, a long one by Andrew Stock, which goes from his wanting to be a tanker -- or a tank! -- to thinking of Robotech and Ultraman when he heard "mechanized infantry" at recruitment, to his Buddhist mantras and prayers on the front.

Leche finishes with an essay on the healing powers of writing, and the usefulness of veterans-only classes as a space safe against the well-meaning (sometimes) but dumb questions of civilian fellow students. Writing about trauma is said to be good for physical and emotional health, even if no one reads it. She mentions an NEA video "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience" which encouraged her students; she also talks about the gulf between military writing and speaking -- short words, short SVO sentences, short paragraphs, avoid all ambiguity, brevity and clarity (if you know the acronyms and jargon) above all -- and the complexity and playfulness of creative writing; one of her prompts says "Use at least three metaphors and/or similes."

Practicalities: it's quite a short book, with only 127 pages for the soldiers' essays themselves. 32 writers, 12 female (plus one "J. J." with no clues.) I don't know if that reflects the demographics of the modern US military or of the soldiers who choose to take a creative writing class in Afghanistan.

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