Daniel Sjursen is a Westpoint graduate, and a retired Army officer who
Daniel Sjursen
served in combat tours of both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and is a Westpoint history instructor. His books include Ghost Riders of Baghdad, Patriotic Dissent, and A True History of the United States.
Matthew Hoh was a Marine Corps company commander who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. After reassignment to the US State Department, he resigned in
Matthew Hoh
protest from his post in Afghanistan over US strategic policy and goals there in September 2009. Since then he has worked as a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and is the former director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a network of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in US strategy in Afghanistan.
Aaron Mate, one of my “go-to” journalists, recently interviewed both men about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and their professional opinions about our 20-year war in that country.
Over the past few weeks, I have watched and read a great deal of material about America’s longest war and president Biden’s decision to withdraw ground forces.
Of everything that I have scoured, this interview is one of the best.
Both veterans have been long-time critics of American policy in Afghanistan. In the interview below, they rehearse their critical analysis of why this war was wrong from the beginning, why nothing ever improved, and why it was long past time for us to get out. (56 minutes long)
I believe that the speaker at my morning worship service was trying to be nonpartisan. And I appreciate that.
But it’s hard to keep our biases in check, especially when they are rarely confronted by someone who sees the world differently.
Hers were showing this morning.
In the opening moments of the sermon, the speaker began to lead a prayer
A person wounded in a bomb blast outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, arrives at a hospital in Kabul. The Pentagon confirmed at least two blasts outside the Kabul airport and said there were a number of casualties. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
on behalf of the families of the 13 soldiers recently killed by 2 suicide bombers in Afghanistan. She didn’t mention the 170+ Afghan civilians, men, women, and children who died, as well.
Then she included a prayer request for the Christians in Afghanistan who will almost certainly suffer under Taliban rule. I could see people nodding their heads in agreement.
But the real enthusiasm was yet to come.
Finally, she mentioned the need for our nation’s leaders to be directed by
God’s wisdom in their decision-making. Wow. Suddenly, the congregation erupted in applause and loud “amens” rippled throughout the auditorium.
Obviously, the community agreed heartily that THIS was the most essential request — “God, give us leaders with greater wisdom.”
I agree with these words, but I know that the kind of wisdom I was praying for is very, very different from the “wisdom” my fellow church members believe is now lacking in Washington, D.C.
You see, I know my community.
I know that the majority of the folks in my church are devoted consumers of Fox News. Many also watch Christian television, with people like Pat Robertson offering their “religious” views on world events. Consequently, their perspective on world affairs is shaped heavily by these dual propaganda outlets of the Republican party. (CBN news is only Fox News with a smile.)
Ever since president Biden initiated our withdrawal from Afghanistan (which, remember, will never entail a complete withdrawal of all special forces, intelligence operatives, and drone strikes), the Republican party and the entire assembly of corporate, cable news outlets have all uniformly condemned Biden’s withdrawal efforts.
More than that, they continually argue that US troops should remain in Afghanistan. But, of course, remaining in Afghanistan means more war, more killing and destruction, more dead Americans, more slaughtered, innocent Afghans.
No doubt, the current withdrawal could have been planned more thoroughly. But it is far from clear that all the blame should fall on Biden’s shoulders. There is more than enough blame to go around, and we ought to be heaping shovel-fulls of it onto the culprits in the Pentagon, the CIA, the State and Defense Departments, the weapons contractors, and the entire military command structure that all perpetuated this $2.35 trillion, 20-year boondoggle of a horror show on the Afghan and American people.
However, I know that the vast majority of the men and women who were enthusiastically applauding for “leaders with divine wisdom” in my worship service this morning were not thinking about the selfishness or the guilt of America’s bloodthirsty military-industrial complex — a complex that enriched itself to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 20 years.
No. They were condemning the president who finally decided “to end” this 20 war.
They were also — knowingly, self-consciously — endorsing the litany of war-mongering media figures now calling for American troops to remain in Afghanistan to keep up the fight.
Implicitly, they were praying for more death and destruction because, rather than thinking with the mind of Christ, they have been thoroughly propagandized and brainwashed by our corporate media whose corporate owners ALL LOVE WAR.
It is always a struggle for me to worship with people who embrace without question (and applaud with both hands) the egocentric brutality of the American Empire with its colonial hubris and penchant for human exploitation.
But I am a part of Christ’s church. So I stay. And I pray in my own way. And I try to talk with others about these things whenever I can. Though few will listen for long.
A prepublication ordering page is now available at the Wipf & Stock website for my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People.
I hope that you will check it out and seriously consider buying a copy so that you can inform your Christian friends, and others, about the serious mistake the American church makes by endorsing Israel’s behavior in the Middle East.
You can place your orders (because I understand that everyone will want to place multiple orders for friends and relatives. Ha!) by clicking HERE.
Unfortunately, the fellow in charge of cover design has been very ill for some time, but whatever he eventually comes up with will be inserted into the order page.
Below is the description I wrote for the publisher’s advertising purposes:
When Christians collude in crimes against humanity, they betray their citizenship in the kingdom of God, demonstrating that Christ’s Lordship does not rule over every area of their lives. The popular ideology known as Christian Zionism is a prime enabler of such widespread discipleship–failure in western Christianity. As the state of Israel continues to violate international law with colonial settlement in lands captured by warfare, legalized racial discrimination, and the creation of what many have called “the world’s largest open-air prison” in Gaza, Christian Zionists continue their unqualified support for Zionist Israel. Though Israel advertises itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” it is actually a rigid ethnocracy–its entire society built on the foundations of Jewish supremacy over a Palestinian underclass. History will eventually judge Christian Zionist support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in the same way people of conscience now condemn the Christian church in the American South for its defense of slavery and hostility towards the civil rights movement. Just as the Southern Baptist church finally repudiated its pro-slavery past, so everyone genuinely devoted to Jesus Christ must repudiate both the ideology and the legacy of Christian Zionism.
Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important English language journalists working today. He now publishes on Substack. I encourage you to subscribe. I think it’s about $5/month.
Glenn’s article today catalogues the 20 year history of official lies that have been fed to the American people about Afghanistan.
Glenn reminds us of something no American should ever forget.
All governments lie, without exception.
Every president lies, without exception.
All generals lie, without exception.
American wars are launched and maintained by lies, without exception.
Below is Glenn’s article. All emphasis is mine:
Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan.
The Taliban give an exclusive interview to Al Jazeera after taking control of the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan. Aug. 15, 2021 (Al Jazeera/YouTube)
“The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed: “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. . . . We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced: “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds. . . . The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan.”
For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning. The Taliban is on the verge of permanent obliteration. The U.S. is fortifying the Afghan security forces, which are close to being able to stand on their own and defend the government and the country.
Just five weeks ago, on July 8, President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable because, while their willingness to do so might be in doubt, “the Afghan government and leadership . . . clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” Biden then vehemently denied the accuracy of a reporter’s assertion that “your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” Biden snapped: “That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.”
Biden continued his assurances by insisting that “the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.” He went further: “the likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” And then, in an exchange that will likely assume historic importance in terms of its sheer falsity from a presidential podium, Biden issued this decree:
Q. Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —
THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
When asked about the Taliban being stronger than ever after twenty years of U.S. warfare there, Biden claimed: “Relative to the training and capacity of the [Afghan National Security Forces] and the training of the federal police, they’re not even close in terms of their capacity.” On July 21 — just three weeks ago — Gen. Mark Milley, Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that “there’s a possibility of a complete Taliban takeover, or the possibility of any number of other scenario,” yet insisted: “the Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.”
Similar assurances have been given by the U.S. Government and military leadership to the American people since the start of the war. “Are we losing this war?,” Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, asked rhetorically in a news briefing from Afghanistan in 2008, answering it this way: “Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.” On September 4, 2013, then-Lt. Gen. Milley — now Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — complained that the media was not giving enough credit to the progress they had made in building up the Afghan national security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Gen. Milley insisted.
None of this was true. It was always a lie, designed first to justify the U.S’s endless occupation of that country and, then, once the U.S. was poised to withdraw, to concoct a pleasing fairy tale about why the prior twenty years were not, at best, an utter waste. That these claims were false cannot be reasonably disputed as the world watches the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan as if the vaunted “Afghan national security forces” were china dolls using paper weapons. But how do we know that these statements made over the course of two decades were actual lies rather than just wildly wrong claims delivered with sincerity?
To begin with, we have seen these tactics from U.S. officials — lying to the American public about wars to justify both their initiation and continuation — over and over. The Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, was begun with a complete fabrication disseminated by the intelligence community and endorsed by corporate media outlets: that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 2011, President Obama, who ultimately ignored a Congressional vote against authorization of his involvement in the war in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, justified the NATO war by denying that regime change was the goal: “our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives . . . broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Even as Obama issued those false assurances, The New York Times reported that “the American military has been carrying out an expansive and increasingly potent air campaign to compel the Libyan Army to turn against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.”
Just as they did for the war in Afghanistan, U.S. political and military leaders lied for years to the American public about the prospects for winning in Vietnam. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published reports about thousands of pages of top secret documents from military planners that came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Provided by former RAND official Daniel Ellsberg, who said he could not in good conscience allow official lies about the Vietnam War to continue, the documents revealed that U.S. officials in secret were far more pessimistic about the prospects for defeating the North Vietnamese than their boastful public statements suggested. In 2021, The New York Times recalledsome of the lies that were demonstrated by that archive on the 50th Anniversary of its publication:
Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
“In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. “You can see the heavy drain.”
That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.”
Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press.
The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate.
The pattern of lying was virtually identical throughout several administrations when it came to Afghanistan. In 2019, The Washington Post — obviously with a nod to the Pentagon Papers — published a report about secret documents it dubbed “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war.” Under the headline “AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH,” The Post summarized its findings: “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.” They explained:
Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.
In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”
None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.
As the Post explained, “the documents contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.” Those documents dispel any doubt about whether these falsehoods were intentional:
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
Last month, the independent journalist Michael Tracey, writing at Substack, interviewed a U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The former soldier, whose job was to work in training programs for the Afghan police and also participated in training briefings for the Afghan military, described in detail why the program to train Afghan security forces was such an obvious failure and even a farce. “I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,” he said. In sum, “as far as the US military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation”: an endless money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and takeover by the Taliban.
In light of all this, it is simply inconceivable that Biden’s false statements last month about the readiness of the Afghan military and police force were anything but intentional. That is particularly true given how heavily the U.S. had Afghanistan under every conceivable kind of electronic surveillance for more than a decade. A significant portion of the archive provided to me by Edward Snowden detailed the extensive surveillance the NSA had imposed on all of Afghanistan. In accordance with the guidelines he required, we never published most of those documents about U.S. surveillance in Afghanistan on the ground that it could endanger people without adding to the public interest, but some of the reporting gave a glimpse into just how comprehensively monitored the country was by U.S. security services.
In 2014, I reported along with Laura Poitras and another journalist that the NSA had developed the capacity, under the codenamed SOMALGET, that empowered them to be “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in at least five countries. At any time, they could listen to the stored conversations of any calls conducted by cell phone throughout the entire country. Though we published the names of four countries in which the program had been implemented, we withheld, after extensive internal debate at The Intercept, the identity of the fifth — Afghanistan — because the NSA had convinced some editors that publishing it would enable the Taliban to know where the program was located and it could endanger the lives of the military and private-sector employees working on it (in general, at Snowden’s request, we withheld publication of documents about NSA activities in active war zones unless they revealed illegality or other deceit). But WikiLeaks subsequently revealed, accurately, that the one country whose identity we withheld where this program was implemented was Afghanistan.
There was virtually nothing that could happen in Afghanistan without the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge. There is simply no way that they got everything so completely wrong while innocently and sincerely trying to tell Americans the truth about what was happening there.
In sum, U.S. political and military leaders have been lying to the American public for two decades about the prospects for success in Afghanistan generally, and the strength and capacity of the Afghan security forces in particular — up through five weeks ago when Biden angrily dismissed the notion that U.S. withdrawal would result in a quick and complete Taliban takeover. Numerous documents, largely ignored by the public, proved that U.S. officials knew what they were saying was false — just as happened so many times in prior wars — and even deliberately doctored information to enable their lies.
Any residual doubt about the falsity of those two decades of optimistic claims has been obliterated by the easy and lightning-fast blitzkrieg whereby the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan as if the vaunted Afghan military did not even exist, as if it were August, 2001 all over again. It is vital not just to take note of how easily and frequently U.S. leaders lie to the public about its wars once those lies are revealed at the end of those wars, but also to remember this vital lesson the next time U.S. leaders propose a new war using the same tactics of manipulation, lies, and deceit.
As Afghanistan’s regional capitols continue to fall before advancing Taliban forces, president Biden has decided to send 3,000 US troops back into the country to safeguard the diplomatic corps evacuating the US embassy in Kabul.
Naturally, the corporate media frames each Taliban victory as a direct result
Taliban fighters pose with an abandoned Humvee
of president Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. The headlines are predictably repetitive: As US Forces Withdraw, the Taliban Gains More Ground. Or something to that effect.
The clearly intended implication is that complete responsibility for Afghanistan’s current, military crisis belongs entirely to Joe Biden.
Thus, the withdrawal of US forces becomes the sole, solitary, efficient cause for the Taliban’s successive victories and Afghanistan’s mounting chaos.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This steady stream of corporate headlines offer a good example of the way framing works to sell a news story from one direction rather than another. In other words, we are seeing how framing becomes a tool for propaganda.
Let’s sit back and ask ourselves a few questions, the first of which should be this: what happened to the Afghan military in all this mess?
I have yet to see a single US news headline ask, what to my mind, ought to be the more important question: Why is an ineffective and feeble Afghan army allowing the Taliban to roll victoriously through the country uncontested?
Thisis the scandalous mystery — or is it such a mystery? — that international media outlets ought to be investigating. Yet, it is being ignored. Why?
For the past 20 years, our esteemed leaders in the Pentagon have sworn time and time again with their right hands placed on a tall stack of very large Bibles, before Congress and the American public, that “we were making excellent progress” in training and equipping the Afghan military.
For decades, US generals have sworn that the Afghan government and all of its people would be protected by an Afghan army of 300,000 men. Each and every one of them fully prepared by the best training and equipment that the Pentagon could provide.
Now, after 20 years of very expensive and utterly empty promises, we have finally seen what American training has accomplished!
Yes, it only took 20 years, but we have successfully trained an Afghan army that is run over by the Taliban like a stray dog on a busy highway.
Yet, I doubt if we will ever see a news headline introducing an honest investigation into this bizarre story, though there are certainly many people ready and able to tell the truth about this colossally misguided boondoggle. (I have my theories, but that must be left for another time.)
So, don’t be misled by the misdirection of our corporate, militaristic propaganda.
The tragic mess now on display in Afghanistan is the clearest evidence yet that president Biden made the right decision. Our presence in Afghanistan has almost certainly left the country in worse condition than when we first invaded.
And even then, American policy toward Afghanistan had already made a mess of the nation’s internal affairs.
Let’s not forget that as far back as 1979 both President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski were more than happy to sacrifice the people of Afghanistan on the altar of America’s anti-Soviet foreign policy.
In effect, we created the Taliban to fight the Soviets. We prompted the civil war that has torn the country into pieces over these past 40 years! It is only right and fitting that they are now ready to haunt our backsides until we are finally gone.
Don’t be misled. It is long past time for the US to focus on helping people, not with bombs, drones, or invading armies, but with old fashioned diplomacy, financial aid, humanitarian assistance, and humility.
Perhaps the most grotesque feature of American civil religion is its manipulation of Christian faith to fit the role of pious cheerleader for this nation’s militaristic imperialism throughout the world.
Of course, this requires the collusion of our religious leaders — I hesitate to call them “Christian” — who applaud the “sacrifice” of our noble troops, willing “to give their lives for the nation.”
More recently, Dr. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, a professor of religious studies at Moravian College outside Philadelphia, has written a book entitled, And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and US War-Culture.Her book explores the ways in which Christian vocabulary is used to justify, and to valorize, America’s endless wars.
She further explores the long-term damage of “moral injury” ravaging the consciences of soldiers who come home from the battleground.
Below is an excerpt of an interview with Dr. Denton-Borhaug conducted by Robert Scheer and Scheer Post. The interview transcript is titled, “Christianity is the Linchpin in America’s War Machine,” a title that ought to make every Christian gag. [All emphasis mine.]
RS: Well, really what you’re talking about is a sickness, a profound cultural sickness that has a unique, dare I say American-exceptional variant in its relation to Christianity, modern Christianity, that has inflicted great pain not only on the world–I shouldn’t say “not only”–and on innocent civilians throughout the world, but on the warriors that are summoned or encouraged or paid–mercenaries–to go out and do this. And you’re saying there’s a fundamental connection as well as a contradiction between this nation’s claim to be influenced by notions of a deity and an almighty and accountability in a religious sense, and the barbarism–the barbarism that has consumed our relation to the world.
KDB: That’s absolutely right, and you know, part of the–I’m really glad that you used the word “contradiction,” because contradictions abound in this landscape. And part of the contradiction has to do with the way that U.S. Americans tend to understand ourselves, and especially our system of government, with respect to religion. So we like to think that we have these nice and comfortable and straightforward separations between the ways that we operate in the world politically and whatever religious commitments we may have. We like to think that we have successfully relegated those kinds of commitments to the private sphere. But what I have come to understand is that that, in fact, is not true at all. There’s a tremendous amount of interplay that goes on between those supposedly private commitments and then the way that we understand and act within these much larger political realities.
So of course, a lot of this falls under the heading of what scholars call civil religion: the way in which religion is intertwined with, and impacts, our systems and our practices and our rituals of civil government. But I think we have tended to think that all of this is very conscious and under control, and thoughtfully executed. And my work really exhibited to me that there is this sort of deep emotional, rather subconscious and very destructive subterranean stream of religious violence that impacts the ways that we think about war, and actually that acts also as a very strong mechanism of concealment and mystification. So we tend not to see these things; we tend not to be aware of them. And simultaneously, we’re really deeply impacted by them. We approach the realities of war and militarization in the United States as a kind of sacred reality.
But, again, even as I say that, when these subterranean streams are lifted to the surface, because they have become sacred in so many people’s ways of thinking, it can be very disconcerting to hear them named as such. And it can raise a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and even feelings of anger, on the part of many people.
RS: Well, but your basic research is with the one set of victims. I mean, we should never forget that bombing weddings with drones creates, in a traditional sense, real victims out there that we sort of discard; we think of war as a video game now, and we just blow people up all over, and we’ve been doing it, whether it was shock and awe and the great display of military power, or what we do mindlessly, or our president does almost every day, whether it’s Biden or Trump. But you’ve focused on the warriors.
Not since the days immediately following the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11 has the war in Afghanistan received as much media attention as it is getting today. Now, everyone is for its continuation, or so it seems.
Corporate media war-mongering knows no bounds.
President Biden’s plans to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan has suddenly turned every broadcast journalist into a distressed, hand-wringing, honorary member of Human Rights Watch, fretting and fussing over the future state of an Afghanistan free of American military forces.
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that US forces will continue to dominate the Afghan landscape (and neighboring Pakistan) with armed drones dropping bombs and missiles into peoples’ homes, a legion of civilian contractors pursuing American business interests, and intelligence operations manipulating the government and assassinating anyone who gets in their way.
Not since music producer Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound” have I heard such a fully orchestrated, monotonous, uniform wall of repetitious lament from corporate news broadcasters universally expressing, whether explicitly or by implication, their desire to keep US troops in a war overseas.
Never mind that this war – which has always included US attacks in neighboring Pakistan – has dragged on for over 20 years; never mind that the original mission of capturing Osama bin Laden was accomplished long ago; never mind that the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers demonstrates what many have long suspected – that no one in the Pentagon, State, or Defense Departments ever had any hope for the situation’s improvement, much less a military solution to our “why can’t we fix Afghanistan?” query.
Nevertheless, everyone from Fox News to MSNBC is now lamenting president Biden’s “irrational,” even “cowardly” decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Suddenly, it appears that American elites actually care about the fate of poor
Army troops returning in December from a deployment to Afghanistan. Credit…John Moore Getty Images
Muslims overseas. Thoughts of a barbaric Taliban regime imposing their version of Sharia law over women and girls is more than suburban coffee table conversations can tolerate.
But the fact of the matter is that the only reason CNN and CBS news anchors now want us all to believe that Afghanistan’s future (sans US group troops) looks so devastatingly bleak, is because these same people have thoroughly and irresponsibly ignored the lives of the Afghan people for nearly 20 years.
Propaganda is not only a matter of spreading misinformation. It also requires withholding inconvenient truths.
Think about it.
How often has the American public been updated, on a regular basis, about the details of what the US presence in Afghanistan has meant for the country’s civilian population?
What about the regular CIA assassinations; murders that can wipe out entire families, including young children?
(Below. Watch “Living Under Drones,” approx. 7 minutes)
No. Only the ignorant or the propagandists will believe that the future suddenly looks bleak for the Afghan people after America “leaves.” The truth is that sharing their country with America’s occupation army has always been a nightmare for the Afghan and Pakistani people.
Just ask the little children who instinctively run in fear every time they imagine a noise overhead because they are terrified of another drone attack.
In the early days of planning in the Oval Office, there was a nanosecond given over to the suggestion that al Qaeda should be treated as an international criminal organization, and that the Twin Towers attack should be viewed as a horrible crime rather than an act of war.
Two possible paths were laid out before president George W. Bush. The first option, with important historical precedent, is explained in a 2006 report, 9/11: Five Years Later. The Forward to this government report explains that: “Before 9/11, combating terrorism was treated largely as a law enforcement problem.”
Not anymore.
President Bush forever changed the US attitude towards “terrorism” – which still remains horribly (and conveniently) ill-defined.
Eager to declare himself “a war president,” George W. Bush acquiesced to the military bureaucracy’s (which naturally includes the weapons manufacturers who have made billions since this war began) insistence that 9/11 be viewed as an act of war requiring a military (rather than an international law-enforcement) response.
The people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Yemen, AND the United States have all suffered the devastating, inhumane consequences of that egotistical, presidential decision ever since.
Only those who have not been paying attention will now believe that US forces have been protecting Afghan women and children, civilians who will suddenly come under threat by our withdrawal.
Last week president Biden ordered more illegal airstrikes against Iraqi forces in Iraq and Syrian forces in Syria. The State Department issued a
Images released by the US military showing Syrian facility bombed
statement (more on that below) declaring that the US was merely exercising “its right to self-defense,” echoing Israel’s favorite excuse for its illegal bombings in Gaza.
Let’s recall several crucial facts, however:
One, US military forces in both Iraq and Syria are in those countries illegally. Both are sovereign nations, whether or not we like their governments. Both governments have told the US, in no uncertain terms, that they wanted US troops OUT of their countries long ago.
Thus, we are in both countries as an illegal invading/occupying power. Under international law, such military forces have no right to “self-defense.”
We are the illegal aggressors. It is the Iraqis and Syrians who have every legal, moral right to defend themselves against the unwanted US forces that have outrageously installed themselves in their countries.
Two, Iran in a neighbor to both Iraq and Syria. The US is not. The Iraqi and Syrian governments are free to seek military assistance from anyone they choose.
Given the hostility directed against Iran by the US, and the close regional, strategic affinities linking Iraq and Syria to Iran, it is hardly surprising that local militias fighting against the unwanted US presence would seek and accept Iran’s assistance in their struggle.
That assistance does not constitute a threat against the US.
Keeping those simple facts in mind, Glenn Greenwald offers an excellent
U.S. citizens derive no benefit, but instead suffer great loss, from endless war in the Middle East. But their interests are irrelevant to decisions of bipartisan Washington.
For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: The U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”
Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense?” Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. “homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were “defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.
The Pentagon’s description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration’s claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were “defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon’s arguments.
Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden’s dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama’s deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump’s bombing of Assad’s forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden’s bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing U.S. troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.
In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden’s Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”
Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast‘s long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are “parody” because when it comes to the U.S.’s Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The U.S. presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the U.S.”
That is exactly right. The U.S. government is a lawless entity. It violates the law, including its own Constitution, whenever it wants. The requirement that no wars be fought absent congressional authority is not some ancillary bureaucratic annoyance but was completely central to the design of the country. Article I, Section 8 could not be clearer: “The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare war.” Two months after I began writing about politics — back in December, 2005 — I wrote a long article compiling the arguments in the Federalist Papers which insisted that permitting the president unchecked powers to wage war . . .
I have followed Ray McGovern’s work for many years. He works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Ray McGovern, retired CIA official and a man with a conscience
Washington.
His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
All demagogic governments think they need an enemy, real or imagined. Nothing unites a people like the fear of a common enemy. It’s an ancient tactic used to distract people from their own government’s failures and to unite them around an otherwise disreputable government establishment.
Naturally, career politician Joe Biden understands these things very well, as do the various agencies and corporate powers that benefit from keeping the American people misinformed and distracted.
The corporate media are not to be trusted, folks. Not at all…
Here is Ray’s piece:
If Wednesday morning’s passive-voice (“Russian hackers are accused of”), evidence-free New York Times article titled “Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden” has a familiar ring, look who wrote it. The senior author is David Sanger, the NYT’s chief Washington correspondent. Based on Sanger’s unenviable record, the story he wrote with Nicole Perlroth can be dismissed as a proverbial nothingburger with Sanger sauce.
The article claims that Russian hackers breached a contractor for the Republican National Committee (RNC) last week “around the same time that Russian cybercriminals launched the largest global ransomware attack on record”. Sanger and co-author Nicole Perlroth cannot resist editorializing in the first paragraph that the “incidents are testing the red lines set by President Biden” at the June 16 summit with Russian President Putin. Biden, they noted, “presented Mr. Putin with a list of 16 critical sectors of the American economy that, if attacked, would provoke a response”.
The NY Times does not seem to know if the RNC is included among those 16. Indeed, there is little sign that the Times actually knows what those 16 critical sectors are. No worries, the Russians nonetheless “are accused” of activities that “test those red lines”.
The Times, and Sanger in particular, have shown themselves receptive to parts of our government (especially the security services) as well as to those who need an enemy to justify huge defense spending – all of whom have a deep vested interest in painting Russia and Putin in the most dangerous colors. It is a safe bet that this is what is going on here.
Sanger was first off the blocks in parroting former CIA Director John Brennan’s concoction, in the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 6, 2017, that Putin personally directed the “hacking of the DNC emails”. Those who rely on the NT Times do not know this yet, but testimony taken under oath by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 5, 2017 revealed that no one – not the Russians, no one – hacked those emails.
Still, it is hard to believe how Sanger nor Perlroth (who specializes in cyber security) can pretend to be unaware of the that House Intelligence Committee testimony.
While for the past five years Sanger has been concentrating on the “threat” from Russia and parroting grist from his CIA feeders, he has a long unenviable record as mouthpiece for those asserting WMD in Iraq, to those claiming falsely that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons, to those contriving the story about the Russians paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops.
His most disreputable performance came in the months before the March 2003 attack on Iraq. For example, Sanger reported “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as flat fact no fewer than seven times in this article of July 29, 2002.
Call me “quaint” or “obsolete”, but back in the day we intelligence analysts looked closely at a source’s record before we put his/her words into a serious report.
about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and their professional opinions about our 20-year war in that country.
Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important English language journalists working today. 
of American evangelicalism with our militaristic, national idolatry in my book, 
today. Now, everyone is for its continuation, or so it seems.
