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William Astore, Making America Sane Again

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I’ve recently begun reading Caroline Alexander’s new book, Skies of Thunder, The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World. Its focus is the theater of operations in which my father served as operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos, an all-volunteer unit, in World War II. And no, he isn’t mentioned, though his commander Phil Cochran (“Flip Corkin” in the comic strip of that time, Terry and the Pirates) is. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. was instantly at war in both Asia and Europe and my father, then too old to be drafted, soon volunteered. Though, as a Jew, he undoubtedly wanted to fight the Nazis, he was sent to India as part of that unit’s operations against the Japanese in Burma.

By May 1945, the Nazi regime had gone down in flames, and that August, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were A-bombed more or less to smithereens, the Japanese surrendered, ending “his” war, but, as it turned out — from Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq — anything but ending Washington’s disastrous urge to be a global war state. Like so many former soldiers of that war, he never really talked to his son about his experiences. Fortunately, he at least got to see (and help) the genuine good guys win.

However, by the time American-style war hit my world — in Vietnam — the United States looked like anything but the good guy (at least to me and so many young people like me) and I found myself volunteering (so to speak) to turn in my draft card and protest that war in the streets. By then, of course, the American national (in)security state was already succeeding in a striking fashion at only one thing (other than turning itself into a remarkable growth industry): it was largely freeing itself of us and of Congress. And of course, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular Bill Astore, whose Bracing Views Substack is a must-read, makes all too clear today, this country, the globe’s (once) dominant power, has only gone from bad to worse when it comes to both preparations for and making war in a big time and, in both cases, remarkably disastrous fashion. Tom

From the Arsenal of Democracy to an Arsenal of Genocide

The Pernicious Price of Global Reach, Global Power, and Global Dominance

During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard.  Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there.  So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?

Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense” -- it's the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.

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Engelhardt, A Distinctly [You Fill This In]-Topian World

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[Note for TomDispatch readers: Yes, TD is back after a pre-Labor Day break and ready to chug on in this ever-stranger world of ours, a subject I take up today. But to keep on going in that world, this site needs your support, so let me plead with you once again to visit our donation page and see what you might contribute to keep us rolling (staggering?) along. And a million thanks to those of you who did so in recent weeks. You make all the difference! Tom]

Trumptopia and Beyond

Is Reality the Biggest Fiction of All Today?

Yes, long ago, I dreamt of being a novelist. Two ancient manuscripts packed away in a distant corner of my closet attest to that (ir)reality, as does one novel focused on the world of publishing (in which I'd been an editor) that made it into print, even if it was barely noticed. Still, from time to time, I've thought about trying to write fiction again.

These days, however, when I consider that possibility, I find myself smiling, however grimly. After all, how could you truly write fiction in a world -- and I'm not just thinking of Donald Trump (though I most distinctly am thinking of him) -- that seems ever more fictionalized? How could you write fiction in a country whose former president and presidential candidate used the word "I" 317 times in a single speech or, in another, spun a tale of near death in an almost-helicopter crash in which nothing he mentioned actually happened? He even -- all too conveniently -- put the wrong "Brown" (Kamala Harris's pal Willie Brown instead of California governor Jerry Brown) in the copter that didn't come close to going down with him on board. Oh, wait, maybe there actually was a helicopter with him and another cast of characters entirely that did at least come closer to going down! And just in case you hadn't noticed, he's already claiming, in a strikingly repetitive fashion, that Joe Biden's withdrawal from the presidential campaign and Kamala Harris's nomination together represent nothing short of a "coup" in the Democratic Party: "This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow... They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

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Andrew Bacevich, Whose Century Was That?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve reached that moment in August when I take a brief break.  TD will be back either the Tuesday or Thursday after Labor Day. In the meantime, let me thank all of you readers who, in recent weeks, in response to my pleas, gave this site the sort of money it really does need to keep going.  You were wonderful and I simply can’t express my appreciation adequately!  But, as I’m sure you guessed, more is still needed (truly!) and so, in this break moment, I plead with any of you who have the urge to visit our donation page to do your damnedest.  Many, many thanks in advance.  You truly do make all the difference!

And for this break moment, I had the urge to post what I think is a classic “best of” TD piece from (yes!) 2009 by the superb Andrew Bacevich. All these years and events later, it still puts “the American century” in genuine — even unique — perspective.  Don’t miss it and, while you’re at it, consider getting a copy of his superb just-published first novel Ravens on a Wire about something he experienced personally — the U.S. military in the wake of the Vietnam War. Tom]

Imagine if, on the day in early April when Jiverly Voong walked into the American Civic Association Building in Binghamton, New York, and gunned down 13 people, you read this headline in the news: “Binghamton in shock as police investigate what some critics call ‘mass murder.'” If America’s newspapers, as well as the TV and radio news were to adopt that as a form, we would, of course, find it absurd. Until proven guilty, a man with a gun may be called “a suspect,” but we know mass murder when we see it. And yet, in one of the Bush administration’s lingering linguistic triumphs, even as information on torture programs pours out, the word “torture” has generally suffered a similar fate.

The agents of that administration, for instance, used what, in the Middle Ages, used to be known bluntly as “the water torture” — we call it “waterboarding” — 183 times in a single month on a single prisoner and yet the other morning I woke up to this formulation on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition: “…harsh interrogations that some consider torture.” And here’s how Gwen Ifill of the News Hour put it the other night: “A tough Senate report out today raised new questions about drastic interrogations of terror suspects in the Bush years.” Or as USA Today typically had it: “Obama opened the door for possible investigation and prosecution of former Bush administration officials who authorized the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that critics call torture.” Or, for that matter, the New York Times: “…the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other techniques that critics say crossed the line into torture…”

Torture, as a word, except in documents or in the mouths of other people — those “critics” — has evidently lost its descriptive powers in our news world where almost any other formulation is preferred. Often these days the word of choice is “harsh,” or even “brutal,” both substitutes for the anodyne “enhanced” in the Bush administration’s own description of the package of torture “techniques” it institutionalized and justified after the fact in those legal memos. The phrase was, of course, meant to be law-evading, since torture is a crime, not just in international law, but in this country. The fact is that, if you can’t call something what it is, you’re going to have a tough time facing what you’ve done, no less prosecuting crimes committed not quite in its name.

What we call things, the names we use, matters. How, for instance, we imagine our past affects how we see the present and future, as Andrew Bacevich makes clear below. It’s little wonder that Bacevich’s book, The Limits of Power, became a bestseller. He has a way of hacking through the verbiage of our world, always heading for reality; he also has a way, as the Chinese used to put it, of “rectifying names” — that is, bringing reality and naming practices back into sync. Here, for instance, is how, at the end of Limits, he frames Washington’s consensus urge to respond to two failed wars and a failing global mission by expanding the U.S. military:

“America doesn’t need a bigger army. It needs a smaller — that is, more modest — foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise.”

Now, let him go to work in the same fashion on our truncated “American Century” (and catch a video of him discussing the subject as well). Tom

Farewell, the American Century

Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out

In a recent column, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote, "What Henry Luce called 'the American Century' is over." Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce's pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.

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