Thousands more Marines are being deployed to "reinforce advisory activities" (we know what that means; think Vietnam) in Afghanistan
Before he sends up to 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wants to know how many troops are currently on the ground. Whatever that number (how can he not know?), the human toll on Afghan civilians increases daily. Women and children casualties saw a sharp increase in the first six months of 2017, reports Aria Bendix to The Atlantic. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) cites a total of 1,662 civilian deaths between January 1 and June 30, a two percent increase over last year's record high.
President Trump's "new" Afghanistan war strategy does not define what victory would look like, or how his path would be different from the strategy of previous presidents: a mix of conventional military force and diplomatic pressure on Pakistan. "More boots on the ground is serving the long-term global strategy of the U.S. by victimizing and marginalizing the Afghan ordinary people," reads a dispatch from onebillionrising.org. "[U.S.] presence in Afghanistan is not for human rights and liberation, rather to use the geo-strategic position of Afghanistan against its global and regional rivals."
Boundaries of the Kabul Green Zone redrawn to encompass Western embassies, government ministries, and NATO headquarters
The Pentagon's Kabul Security Zone (map) confirms U.S. plans to stay put, long term; the huge public works project is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.
There will be no appeasing Donald Trump or his supporters. "It is useful for Americans to recognize that we are facing something entirely new and different in American history," comments professor Peter Dreier. "Certainly none of us in our lifetimes have confronted an American government led by someone like Trump in terms of his sociopathic, demagogic, impulsive, and vindictive personality (not even Nixon came close). . ."Since 9/11 we have witnessed the rise of a national-security-surveillance state and the expansion of a lockdown mode of existence in a range of institutions that extend from schools and airports to the space of the city itself. The meaning of lockdown in this context has to be understood in broader terms as the use of military solutions to problems for which such approaches are not only unnecessary but further produce authoritarian and anti-democratic policies and practices. Under such circumstances, not only have civil liberties been violated in the name of national security, but the promise of national security has given rise to policies which are punitive, steeped in the logic of revenge, and support the rise of a punishing state whose echoes of authoritarianism are often lost in the moral comas that accompany the country's infatuation with war and the militarization of everyday life." -- Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
UPDATED September 2, 2017"The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor's conscience." -- Robert F. Williams
"You only leave home," writes Kenyan-born Somali poet Warshan Shire, "when home won't let you stay."
A fraction of the millions of people driven from their homes by political, economic and military forces find temporary asylum within the Western nations that precipitated the mass exodus in the first place. Many others without means to flee are subject to the dictates of Empire: that might-makes-right and winner-takes-all, that "America Comes First," as President Donald Trump would have it.
The number of civilians killed by U.S. air strikes in Syria and Iraq has skyrocketed over the last several months, reports New York Magazine Journalist Benjamin Hart: the watchdog organization Airwars found that the total number of dead since Trump took office is roughly equivalent to all civilian casualties during President Obama's entire tenure.
We ignore crimes against humanity at our peril. U.S. citizens have a special responsibility to halt the atrocities committed in their name. Occupations, bombs, and secret operations have wreaked havoc in the Middle East for decades. We must forge another path, where humanity and the planet come first.
Stop the Desperation of Refugees, Stop Bombing Their Countries
The pretense of "humanitarian aid" fails to disguise the true motive for armed intervention -- the enforcement of U.S. global hegemony. While Islamic Fundamentalism does not represent anything emancipating or liberating, military incursions by the United States have occasioned ever more suffering to nations that challenge the notion of American exceptionalism. Want to end the humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes? Stop U.S.-sponsored bombing of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.
"Illegal THAAD, back to the U.S." read their signs. On March 18, 5000 people from across South Korea gathered to protest the forced deployment of the U.S.'s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system on a resistant populace.
The THAAD deployment in Seongiu County is not designed to protect South Korean citizens at all, says JJ Suh, professor of Politics and International Affairs at International Christian University in Japan. "This system is designed to work at higher altitudes, higher than 45 kilometers. But most North Korean missiles are short-range missiles that would fly below 45 kilometers." The THAAD system does, however, serve U.S. strategic interests in the region. It is clear from the locations of American missile defense systems all over the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Asia, that their deployments are aimed at creating a network surrounding China and Russia.
Missile defense systems are dangerous precisely because they enable a preemptive nuclear strike, warn staff writers for ZoominKorea, by removing the enemy's ability to retaliate. Former U.S. President George W Bush walked away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union in 2002, after thirty years of relative stability guaranteed by mutually assured destruction.
Completion of an environmental impact assessment, "to strengthen public support for the missile system by shoring up its political legitimacy," fails to address the core concern of THAAD opponents: U.S. intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state.
A cease-fire in July 1953 left North and South "in a tense state of armed truce ever since, with open warfare just a hair-trigger away,"notes Colombia University's Charles Armstrong. Despite initial ambivalence about the missile defense system, and longed-for rapprochement with the northern half of an illegitimately partitioned country, South Korean President Moon Jae-In appears to have capitulated to U.S. interests.
Hella Organized Bay Area Koreans (HOBAK) demand that President Moon push for a Korean peace treaty and stop deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.
Say NO To THAAD & STOP the WAR GAMES!
Rally at South Korea Consulate San Francisco
Thursday July 27, 4 - 5 pm
3500 Clay Street
"The Korean War never ended," say event organizers. "This July 27th marks the 64th anniversary of the Korean Armistice, an agreement that stopped 'hostilities by armed forces'. 64 years later, the people of Korea and the Asia Pacific Region still face U.S. militarism and constant threats to their land and life.
"When Peace Comes, THAAD Goes!!"
https://www.facebook.com/events/331093273979052/?active_tab=about
"For a society so worried about things that can kill us, we've focused very little of our attention on the thing that surely will," observes Tom Engelhardt, author of The United States of Fear. "Warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world.
"When we speak of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see."
But fear should never be the primary motivation of our actions, says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. "The real danger is that the way we live our lives as Americans, no matter our optimism about the future, is no longer sustainable. We can't continue to live with the current level of income inequality. Hard working people are working longer hours for less pay. And politicians and their benefactors continue to argue for trade policies that have decimated the working class in this country. We can't continue to lock up black and brown people or watch them killed in cold blood by people sworn to protect us or fail to publicly educate all of our children. We can't continue to bomb people around the world into oblivion."
War and militarism fuel climate change. "The Pentagon is the single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels," notes Environmentalists Against War Gar Smith. . . Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival. The amount of oil burned -- and the burden of smoke released -- increases whenever the Pentagon goes to war."
We should not cower in fear, counsels Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor. "Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . . we need to renew our commitments to the political movements on the ground and at work in contesting both the right and the 'lesser evil' of today's corporate and imperial state." But "any fresh vanguard for revolutionary change, must come from the most vulnerable themselves, from the communities long targeted by racist and misogynous power in the history of U.S. capitalism's structural violence. It is these communities' movements that put material pressure on the more privileged and protected to resist the corporate state.
"Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily -- surely not only -- victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity."
"There was, during the course of the 2016 campaign, a small but vocal group of antiwar libertarians and conservatives who had convinced themselves that Donald Trump was preferable to Hillary Clinton because he, Trump, had made his (fictitious) opposition to the Iraq War a cornerstone of his candidacy," wrote James W Carden for Consortiumnews.com. "Trump, it turns out, seems every bit as captive to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus as was his predecessor."