{"id":1130,"date":"2019-03-27T03:44:02","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1130"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:44:02","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:44:02","slug":"american-carnage-fighting-the-forever-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1130","title":{"rendered":"American carnage, fighting the forever war"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974 St. Martin's Press hardcover first edition. Wikicommons. Fair use.In his inaugural address, President
\nTrump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by
\ncriminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from
\nbullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of \u201cAmerican carnage.\u201d It was more than a
\nlittle jarring.<\/i><\/p>\n

Certainly, drug gangs and universally
\naccessible semi-automatic weapons do not contribute to a better life for most
\npeople in this country. When I hear the words \u201cAmerican carnage,\u201d however, the
\nfirst thing I think of is not an endless string of murders taking place in
\nthose mysterious \u201cinner cities\u201d that exist only in the fevered mind of Donald Trump.
\nThe phrase instead evokes the non-imaginary
\ndeaths of hundreds of thousands of people in
\nreal cities and rural areas outside the United States. It evokes the conversion
\nof millions of ordinary people into homeless refugees. It reminds
\nme of the places where American wars seem never to end, where new conflicts
\nseem to take up just as the old ones are in danger of petering out. These sites
\nof carnage are the cities and towns, mountains and deserts of Iraq,
\nAfghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and other places that we don\u2019t even find out about unless we go
\nlooking. They are the places where the United States fights its endless wars.<\/p>\n

During the 2016 election campaign,
\nDonald Trump often sounded like a pre-World War II-style America First
\nisolationist, someone who thought the United States should avoid foreign
\nmilitary entanglements. Today, he seems more like a man with a uniform fetish.
\nHe\u2019s referred to his latest
\nefforts to round up undocumented immigrants in
\nthis country as \u201ca military operation.\u201d He\u2019s similarly stocked his
\ncabinet with one general still on active duty, various retired
\ngenerals, and other military veterans. His pick
\nfor secretary of the interior, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke, served 23 years as a Navy SEAL.<\/p>\n

Clearly, these days Trump enjoys the
\ncompany of military men. He\u2019s more ambivalent about what the military actually
\ndoes. On the campaign trail, he railed against the folly that was \u2013 and is \u2013
\nthe (second) Iraq War, maintaining with
\nquestionable accuracy that he
\nwas \u201ctotally against\u201d it from the beginning. It\u2019s not clear, however, just
\nwhere Trump thinks the folly lies \u2013 in invading Iraq in the first place or in
\nfailing to \u201ckeep\u201d Iraq\u2019s oil afterward.\u00a0It was a criticism he reprised when he introduced Mike Pompeo as his choice to run
\nthe CIA. \u201cMike,\u201d he explained, \u201cif we kept the oil, you probably wouldn\u2019t have
\nISIS because that\u2019s where they made their money in the first place.\u201d Not to worry,
\nhowever, since as he also suggested to Pompeo, \u201cMaybe we\u2019ll have another
\nchance.\u201d Maybe the wrong people had just fought the wrong Iraq war, and Donald
\nTrump\u2019s version will be bigger, better, and even more full of win! Maybe the wrong people had just fought the wrong Iraq
\nwar, and Donald Trump\u2019s version will be bigger, better, and even more full of
\nwin!<\/p>\n

Perhaps Trump\u2019s objection is simply to
\nwars we don\u2019t win. As February ended, he invited the National Governors Association to share his
\nnostalgia for the good old days when \u201ceverybody used to say \u2018we haven\u2019t lost a
\nwar\u2019 \u2013 we never lost a war \u2013 you remember.\u201d Now, according to the president,
\n\u201cWe never win a war. We never win. And we don\u2019t fight to win. We don\u2019t fight to
\nwin. So we either got to win, or don\u2019t fight it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question is, which would Trump
\nprefer: winning or not fighting at all? There\u2019s probably more than a hint of an
\nanswer in his oft-repeated campaign
\npromise that we\u2019re \u201cgoing to win so much\u201d we\u2019ll
\n\u201cget tired of winning.\u201d If his fetish for winning \u2013 whether it\u2019s trade wars or
\nshooting wars \u2013 makes you feel a little too exposed to his sexual imagination,
\nyou\u2019re probably right. In one of his riffs on the subject, he told his audience
\nthat they would soon be pleading they had \u201ca headache\u201d to get him to stop
\nwinning so much \u2013 as if they were 1950s housewives trying to avoid their
\nbedroom duty. But daddy Trump knows best:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I'm going to say, \u2018No, we have to
\nmake America great again.\u2019 You're gonna say, \u2018Please.\u2019 I said, \u2018Nope, nope.
\nWe're gonna keep winning.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more than a hint of where we\u2019re
\nheaded in Trump\u2019s recent announcement that he\u2019ll be asking Congress for a nearly 10%
\nincrease in military spending, an additional annual $54 billion for the
\nPentagon as part of what he calls his \u201cpublic safety and national security
\nbudget.\u201d You don\u2019t spend that kind of money on toys unless you intend to play
\nwith them.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump explained his reasoning, in his trademark idiolect, his unique
\nmangling of syntax and diction:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a landmark event, a message to
\nthe world, in these dangerous times of American strength, security, and
\nresolve. We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools
\nthey need to deter war and when called upon to fight in our name only do one
\nthing, win. We have to win.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it does look like the new president
\nintends to keep on making war into the eternal future. But it\u2019s worth
\nremembering that our forever wars didn\u2019t begin with Donald J. Trump, not by a
\nlong shot.<\/p>\n

The forever wars<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Joe Haldeman\u2019s 1974 novel, The Forever
\nWar<\/em>,<\/em> which won the three major science fiction prizes, a Hugo, a Nebula, and
\na Locus, was about a soldier involved in a war between human beings and the
\nTaurans, an alien race. Because of the stretching of time when traveling at
\nnear light-speed (as Einstein predicted), while soldiers like Haldeman\u2019s hero
\npassed a few years at a time at a front many light-years from home, the Earth
\nthey\u2019d left behind experienced the conflict as lasting centuries. Published
\njust after the end of the Vietnam War \u2013 fought for what seemed to many
\nAmericans like centuries in a land light-years away \u2013 The Forever War<\/em>
\nwas clearly a reflection of Haldeman\u2019s own experience in Vietnam and his return
\nto an unrecognizable United States, all transposed to space.<\/p>\n

In 1965, Haldeman had been drafted into
\nthat brutal conflict, probably <\/strong>one of those that Donald Trump thinks we
\ndidn\u2019t \u201cfight to win.\u201d It certainly seemed like a forever war while it lasted,
\nespecially if you included the French colonial war that preceded it. But it did
\nfinally end, decisively, with an American loss (although, in a sense, it\u2019s
\nstill being fought out by the thousands of Vietnam
\nveterans who live on the streets of our
\ncountry).<\/p>\n

After the attacks of 9\/11 and George W.
\nBush\u2019s declaration of a Global War on Terror, some people found the title of
\nHaldeman\u2019s novel a useful shorthand for what seemed to be an era of permanent
\nwar. It gave us a way of describing then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s
\nvision of a new kind of war against an enemy located, as he told NBC\u2019s Meet the Press<\/em> on September 30, 2001,
\n\u201cnot just in Afghanistan. It is in 50 or 60 countries and it simply has to be
\nliquidated. It has to end. It has to go out of business.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 15 years later, after a decade
\nand a half of forever war in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa,
\nal-Qaeda and the Taliban are still in business, along with a set of new
\nenemies, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon; al-Shabaab
\nin Somalia; and ISIS, which, if we are to believe the president and his
\ncronies, is pretty much everywhere, including
\nMexico. In a war against a tactic (terrorism)
\nor an emotion (terror), it\u2019s hardly surprising that our enemies have just kept
\nproliferating, and with them, the wars. It\u2019s as if Washington were constantly
\n<\/strong>bringing jets, drones, artillery, and firepower of every sort to bear on a
\nnew set of Taurans in another galaxy.<\/p>\n

Decades before Haldeman\u2019s Forever
\nWar, <\/em>George Orwell gave us an unforgettable portrait of a society
\ncontrolled by stoking permanent hatred for a rotating cast of enemies. In 1984<\/em>,<\/em> the
\ncountries of the world have coalesced into three super-nations \u2013 Oceania,
\nEurasia, and Eastasia. Winston Smith, the novel\u2019s protagonist, recalls that,
\nsince his childhood, \u201cwar had been literally continuous, though strictly
\nspeaking it had not always been the same war.\u201d Smith joins thousands of other
\ncitizens of Oceania in their celebration of Hate Week and observes the slick
\nsubstitution of one enemy for another on the sixth day of that week:<\/p>\n

\u201c…when the great orgasm was quivering
\nto its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such
\ndelirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand
\nEurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the
\nproceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces \u2013 at just this
\nmoment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with
\nEurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except that there is no actual
\nannouncement. Rather, the Party spokesman makes the substitution in
\nmid-oration:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe speech had been proceeding for
\nperhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap
\nof paper was slipped into the speaker\u2019s hand. He unrolled and read it without
\npausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the
\ncontent of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
\nwords said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at
\nwar with Eastasia!<\/p>\n

And it had always been thus. \u201cOceania
\nwas at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.\u201d<\/p>\n

1984 <\/em>is, of course, a novel. In our perfectly real country,
\nhuman memories work better than they do in Orwell\u2019s Oceania. Or do they? The
\nUnited States is at war with Iraq. The United States has always been at war
\nwith Iraq. <\/em>Except, of course, when the United States sided with Iraq in its
\nvicious, generation-destroying conflict with Iran in the 1980s. Who today
\nremembers Ronald Reagan\u2019s \u201ctilt toward
\nIraq\u201d and against Iran? They\u2019re so
\nconfusing, those two four-letter countries that start with \u201cI.\u201d Who can keep
\nthem straight, even now that we\u2019ve tilted back toward what\u2019s left of Iraq \u2013
\nTrump has even removed it from his latest version of his Muslim ban list \u2013
\nand threateningly against Iran? They\u2019re so confusing, those two four-letter countries that start with
\n\u201cI.\u201d Who can keep them straight, even now that we\u2019ve tilted back toward what\u2019s
\nleft of Iraq.<\/p>\n

Many Americans do seem to adapt to a
\nrevolving enemies list as easily as the citizens of Oceania. Every few years, I
\nask my college students where the terrorists who flew the planes on 9\/11 came
\nfrom. At the height of the (second and still unfinished) Iraq War, when many of
\nthem had brothers, sisters, lovers, even fathers fighting there, my students
\nwere certain the attackers had all been Iraqis. A few years later, when the
\n\u201creal men\u201d were trying to gin up a new opportunity to \u201cgo to Tehran,\u201d my students were just as sure the terrorists had
\nbeen from Iran. I haven\u2019t asked in a couple of years now. I wonder whether
\ntoday I\u2019d hear that they were from Syria, or maybe that new country, the
\nIslamic State?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t blame my students for not
\nknowing that the 9\/11 attackers included 15 Saudis, two men from the United
\nArab Emirates (UAE), one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. It\u2019s not a fact that\u2019s
\nmuch trumpeted any more. You certainly wouldn\u2019t guess it from where our military
\naid and American-made weaponry goes. After
\nAfghanistan ($3.67 billion) and Israel ($3.1 billion), Egypt is the next
\nlargest recipient of that aid at $1.31 billion in 2015.<\/p>\n

Of course, military aid to other
\ncountries is a windfall for US arms manufacturers. Like food money and other
\nforms of foreign aid from Washington, the countries receiving it are often
\nobligated to spend it on American products.\u00a0In other words, much military
\n\u201caid\u201d is actually a back-door subsidy to companies like Boeing and Lockheed
\nMartin. Being wealthy oil states, the Saudis and the UAE, of course, don\u2019t need
\nsubsidies. They buy their US arms with their own money \u2013 $3.3 billion and $1.3
\nbillion worth of purchases respectively in 2015. And they\u2019re putting that
\nweaponry to use, with US connivance and \u2013 yes, it should make your head spin in
\nan Orwellian fashion \u2013 occasional support from al-Qaeda in the Arabian
\nPeninsula, by taking sides in a civil war in Yemen. US-made fighter planes and
\ncluster bombs have put more than seven million Yemenis in imminent
\ndanger of starvation.<\/p>\n

Joe Haldeman at Finncon 2007 in Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4, Finland – July 2007. Wikicommons\/Mikko Aarnio. Some rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n

War without end, when
\ndid you begin?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When did our forever war begin? When did
\nwe start to think of the president as commander-in-chief first, and executor of
\nthe laws passed by Congress only a distant second? Instead of outright declarations, we\u2019ve
\nhad weasely, after-the-fact congressional approvals, or Authorizations
\nfor the Use of Military Force, that fall short of actual declarations of war. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Was it after 9\/11? Was it during that
\nfirst Iraq war that spanned a few months of 1990 and 1991? Or was it even
\nearlier, during the glorious invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada
\nin 1983, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury? That was the first time the military
\nintentionally \u2013 and successfully \u2013 kept the press sequestered from the action
\nfor the first 48 hours of that short-lived war. They did the same thing in
\n1989, with the under-reported invasion of Panama, when somewhere between 500
\nand 3,500 Panamanians died so that the United States could kidnap and try an
\nerstwhile ally and CIA
\nasset, the unsavory dictator of that country,
\nManuel Noriega.<\/p>\n

Or was it even earlier? The Cold War was
\ncertainly a kind of forever war, one that began before World War II ended, as
\nthe United States used its atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to, as we
\nnow say, \u201csend a message\u201d to the Soviet Union.\u00a0 And it didn\u2019t end until
\nthat empire imploded in 1991.<\/p>\n

Maybe it began when Congress first
\nabdicated its constitutional right and authority to declare war and allowed the
\nexecutive branch to usurp that power. The Korean War (1950-1953) was never
\ndeclared. Nor were the Vietnam War, the Grenada invasion, the Panama invasion,
\nthe Afghan War, the first and second Iraq wars, the Libyan war, or any of the
\nwars we\u2019re presently involved in. Instead of outright declarations, we\u2019ve had
\nweasely, after-the-fact congressional approvals, or Authorizations
\nfor the Use of Military Force, that
\nfall short of actual declarations of war. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The framers of the Constitution
\nunderstood how important it was to place the awesome responsibility for
\ndeclaring war in the hands of the legislative branch \u2013 of, that is, a
\ndeliberative body elected by the people \u2013 leaving the decision on war neither
\nto the president nor the military. Indeed, one of the charges listed against
\nKing George III in the Declaration of Independence was: \u201cHe has affected to
\nrender the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the
\nothers who met in the stifling heat of that 1776 Philadelphia summer, close
\nenough to battle to hear the boom of British cannon, decided they could no
\nlonger abide a king who allowed the military to dominate a duly constituted
\ncivil government. For all their many faults, they were brave men who, even with
\nwar upon them, recognized the danger of a government controlled by those whose
\nsole <\/strong>business is war. They were brave men who, even with war
\nupon them, recognized the danger of a government controlled by those whose sole
\nbusiness is war.<\/p>\n

Since 9\/11, this country has experienced
\nat least 15 years of permanent war in distant lands.\u00a0Washington is now a
\nwar capital. The president is, first and foremost, the commander-in-chief. The
\npower of the expanding military (as well as paramilitary intelligence services
\nand drone assassination forces, not to mention for-profit military contractors
\nof all sorts) is emphatically in presidential hands. Those hands, much discussed in the 2016 election campaign, are
\nnow Donald Trump\u2019s and, as he indicated in his recent address to Congress, he
\nseems hell-bent on restoring the military to the superiority it enjoyed under
\nKing George. That is a danger of the first order.<\/p>\n

This piece is reposted from\u00a0Tom.Dispatch.com\u00a0on March 7, 2017 with that site's permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974 St. Martin's Press hardcover first edition. Wikicommons. Fair use.In his inaugural address, President Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of \u201cAmerican carnage.\u201d It was more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}