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Andrew Bacevich, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

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As one politician, all too sadly, returns to Washington — and you know just who I mean — another, all too sadly, is leaving. Call it, if not the end of history, then at least the end of something that matters (and, of course, the beginning of who knows what else). Departing is Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She will be remembered forever (at least by me) for, in the immediate wake (and that’s an all-too-appropriate word) of the 9/11 attacks, casting the only vote in Congress — yes, the only one! — against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that the rest of the House and Senate passed (420 to 1). It essentially turned the constitutional right to war-making over to the president just as what came to be known as the Global War on Terror began.

For refusing to give George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him a blank check when it came to disastrous rounds of future war-making, she suffered much criticism and abuse. She was called a traitor, even a terrorist. One newspaper labeled her “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.” As she said, looking back years later, “It was a very difficult decision, but I knew that I couldn’t vote for that. And also I knew that, based on my background in psychology, you don’t make hard decisions when you’re upset, when you’re in mourning. You have to think through the implications of any type of major decision. And then I was concerned about the issue of forever wars. It set the stage, and I knew it was going to do that. The military option could be the first option before we tried any other option to settle disputes, to respond to terrorist attacks.”

In some sense, you might say that the vote to send us into that Global War on Terror would end the moment in history following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, when American officials came to consider the U.S. the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth. And you might even say that, so many years later, it also helped set the stage for Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement and his first presidency. With the departure of an antiwar congressional great and the return of Trump to the White House — you know, the man who, on January 6, 2020, tweeted to his followers, who had stormed Congress in the wake of his electoral loss, “We love you. You’re very special!,” then adding, “Remember this day forever!” — let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of the novel Ravens on a Wire (a vivid look at the post-Vietnam American military), consider what History may now be signaling to us. Tom

Surprise!

What I Learned After “The End of History”

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"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so.

Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history's actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).

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William Hartung, A Strategy of Global Collective Suicide?

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Almost 80 years later, it’s sadly all too easy to forget that two nuclear weapons were once used with devastating effect on this planet. Here’s just a small description by one survivor of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that can be found in the book Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors: “Most of the A-Bomb survivors were burned all over their bodies. They were not only naked, but also their skin came off. They were wandering around looking for their parents, husbands, wives, and children in the city of Hiroshima which had been reduced to ashes.”

Only recently, one of the dwindling group of survivors of that American bombing, Shigeko Sasamori, died. She had been a child of 13 when her city was blown to smithereens and, though unlike so many of her compatriots, she lived to tell the tale, one-third of her body was severely burned. Unbelievably enough, she would be one of the 25 “Hiroshima maidens,” all disfigured by the first atomic bombing on this planet, chosen to receive medical help a decade later in New York City. Her death, as the New York Times reported in an obituary, came only “two months after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors, for its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung reminds us today, global nuclear arsenals, including the American one, continue to grow and now hold weapons that make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem more like BBs. To take just the three leading nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, each could, unaided, turn this planet (and undoubtedly several more like it) into giant graveyards.

While it’s true that, since Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9, 1945, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used in war, there are now believed to be more than 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet. Nine countries possess them and, in a significant nuclear conflict, the Earth could be thrown into a state of “nuclear winter” in which billions of us could die of starvation, and yet, as Hartung makes all too vividly clear today, the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal is still in the process of being expanded (the term, hideously enough, is “modernized”) to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in the coming decades. Let him explain. Tom

Angling Toward Armageddon

The Return of Senator Strangelove

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A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe -- a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.

A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

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Stan Cox, Washington Doubles Down on Arming Israel

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Yes, when Hamas attacked Israel brutally on October 7, 2023, at least two tiny children (and possibly more) died. In response, in the year and a quarter since then, the Israelis have slaughtered untold numbers of children in Gaza. And now, in a winter in which food and sometimes water are desperately lacking, news reports indicate that children there are dying in unknown but clearly staggering numbers. With so many of their parents having been driven from their homes by Israeli bombings and living in tents during the Gazan winter, some are even freezing to death.  Talk about an all-too-literal hell on earth, even if, at the moment, the temperatures are now running in the opposite direction!

Almost every day (even New Year’s Day), there have been fresh reports of Israeli bombings or other attacks on the Gaza Strip — known as a “strip” because more than two million Palestinians are living (and dying) in an area only 25 miles long and, at most, seven-and-a-half miles wide  — and daily there are reports of more dead children. Under the nightmarish, increasingly chaotic circumstances, no one can truly know how many children have died there since October 8, 2023, but Palestinian authorities estimate more than 17,000, an official number that’s still rising (and, given what we don’t know, may even prove to be a distinct underestimate).

This is a kind of payback by the Israelis that’s hard to imagine if you aren’t close at hand, but a distinctly day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute one if you are. And of course, to add nightmare to nightmare, little of this would be possible if it weren’t for not just the government and military of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but my government, too. As the New York Times put it in a recent devastating report on deaths in Gaza, “The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war.” In other words, while it’s true that the Israeli military is slaughtering Gazans by the thousands, the weaponry being used has largely been coming — nonstop! — from my own country. Now, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox take up that very subject, a distinctly all-American nightmare that is only likely to get worse during the second presidency of Donald J. Trump. Tom

When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam

Arming Israel Still Has Bipartisan Support in Washington

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In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they'll forget about.  But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results.   

Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe.

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